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Jears to
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lost iD space
Ciddy New York
t
he pundits say New York is boom town. City Hall is winning accolades in
national news magazines and on Sunday morning television talk shows. Herds of
tourists are clogging Manhattan s sidewalks. People are smiling on Wall Street,
as stock values remain miles ahead of where they were just a year ago despite the
East Asian financial crisis. Supposedly, there s a fuzzy feeling of optimism blanketing
the country as jobless rates continue to decline.
(I!iIII!I!I-"---=, .''''.- Who can explain why Americafeels so good? It certainly
doesn't jibe with the facts about family income released last
month by the Washington-based Center for Budget and Policy
Priorities. The data reveal that the average American house-
EDITORIAL
hold is earning less money now than in the 1970s or 1980s,
after accounting for inflation. The split between the wealthy
and the middle class-not to mention the poor-is widening
dramatically, and nowhere is it worse than in New York.
The poorest one-fifth of New York States households have an average annual
income of only $6,790, down from $8,480 in the mid-I980s. F amities in the middle
one-fifth are making, on average, $1,700 less per year than they were in the mid-
1980s. Meanwhile, the voluminous wallets of the richest one-fifth are stuffed to burst-
ing with an average $132,390 in annual income, 46 percent more than they earned a
decade ago.
The City Council also released an income study last month, written by John
Mollenkopf of CUNYs Center for Urban Studies. Mollenkopf found that the citys
black middle class has shrunk dramatically since 1989, from one-third of all African-
American households to just over one-fifth. The drop is astonishing, and in part may
be the result of cutbacks in government and in the back-office operations of the finan-
cial industries.
Why, then, is the American media brimming with optimism? Part of the answer
must be that there is widespread reaping without much sowing-millions more people
than ever before are charging up huge debts on their credit cards, according to The
Wall Street Journal. So even as their incomes stagnate or decline, Americans can feel
wealthy for a time while they sit on piles of unpaid bills.
Theres more to it, however. Marketing the consumer dream is what commercial
media is all about. Thats not cynical-its simply a core value of Commerce 101.
Producers, editors, pundits and the rest of those working in the mainstream mass
media and information sector are part of the wealthiest one-fifth of society that s
doing so tremendously well. They've got a lot of optimism to spare, and it shows.
Fact is, a little skepticism is healthy when it comes to judging the state of the
economy. Like the stock market and property values, no one can fully explain the
many forces that influence public perception. Nor can anyone predict how much time
will pass before reality strikes back. While all of us are supposed to be so optimistic,
who among us is stashing away money for the future? Certainly not the millions of
New Yorkers surviving on $6,790 a year.
Andrew White
Editor
Cover illustration by R. J. Madson
City Limits relies on the generous support of its readers and advertisers. as well as the following funders: The Robert Sterling Clark
Foundation, The Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock, The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, The Joyce Mertz-
Gilmore Foundation, The Scherman Foundation, The North Star Fund, J.P. Morgan & Co. Incorporated, The Booth Ferris Foundation,
The Annie E. Casey Foundation, The New York Foundation. The Taconic Foundation. M& T Bank. Citibank. and Chase Manhattan Bank.
-
(ity Limits
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CITY LIMITS
JANUARY 1998
FEATURES
Garbage Wars ~
Rudy Giuliani has vowed to close down Staten Island's Fresh Kills dump
by New Year's Day 2002. All he needs to do to meet that deadline is redesign
the city's entire rail and road infrastructure, figure out a way to float 13,000 tons
of garbage a day to Vrrginia and convince the city's poorest neighborhoods they
would love a reeking waste transfer station in their backyards. Four years and ticking.
By James Bradley
Left Behind in Sandtown
The Enterprise Foundation spearheaded an effort to rebuild a blighted
Baltimore neighborhood. They spent too much time on construction-and not
enough on renewing a community. By Barry Yeoman
Elva's Endgame ~
An East New York apartment complex suffered for years under HUD's
un-watchful eye. Now they are moving toward a future of tenant ownership and
better living conditions-if only the city will give them a tax break. By Kim Nauer
PIPELINES
Dreading the Needle ~
The Clinton Administration knows that needle exchange programs protect
addicts against HIV and even give them access to the help they need to kick the
habit. Yet, politics and timidity have kept Washington from giving harm reduction
the seal of approval. By Robin Campbell
The Fed's Bad Credit Report ~
Is your bank making enough loans to businesses in low-income neighborhoods?
The Federal Reserve's new CRA database probably won't tell you much more than
you already know. By Carl Vogel
Parental Dissent
School councils are supposed to be a forum for parent participation and a tool
for power, but Rudy Crew is keeping them under wraps and under his thumb.
By Jordan Moss
Immigrant Song and Dance ~
The city and state have hyped their effort to rescue welfare and food stamps
for legal immigrants. But the bureaucracy is having a hard time changing gears.
Review
Harlem Benighted
Cityview
To Overcome the Flood
Spare Change
Petecheesi
Editorial
Letters
Briefs
By Jason Stipp
COMMENTARY
133
By Ellen Stroud
""'--1 3:-- 4--
By James Dumpson
r=1 3=-= s::----
By Aaron Meshon
DEPARTMENTS
2 Ammo 35
4 Professional Directory 3&
5-7 Job Ads 29. 37. 39
s
LETTERS
Incarceration Debate
I have read SashaAbrarnsky's article on
the city's restructuring of the alternatives-
to-incarceration process ("Central
Holding," November 1997). I am grateful
for the concern you show that the new
process achieve success. I assure you that
we are devoting all our energies toward
that goal. Unfortunately, you undertook
your research so early in the implementa-
tion process that the sense of pessimism
your article conveys seems rather prema-
ture. I certainly agree that the success of
this effort, especially with respect to felony
cases, depends in substantial part on the
relationships our court representatives are
able to form with the judges and assistant
district attorneys. But I hardly think our
experience during the first two months of
implementation suggests anything about
how successful we shall be in that regard.
I offer the following points of clarifica-
tion:
You indicate that programs offering
alternatives to incarceration are expected
to work "with a total of 4,200 participants
each year, roughly the same number from
before the change." This number consists
of 3,000 misdemeanor cases and 1,200
felony cases. The misdemeanor number
represents an approximate doubling of the
misdemeanors served by CASES during
its last full year (1,600). In this regard, I
note, as well, that it is CASES'
Community Service Sentencing Project
that "should have approximately 250
referrals each month," not the Court
Employment Project, which handles
felony defendants.
The programs served by the Central
Court Screening Service (CCSS) are all
programs with which the courts have expe-
rience. In the past, the courts dealt with the
programs through court representatives
employed by the programs, but rarely with
staff actually providing services to the
defendant. Under the CCSS, typically, the
courts will continue to relate to the pro-
grams through court representatives. The
difference is that now the court representa-
tives are employed by the central agency
and are responsible for representing sever-
a programs. However, if a judge insists on
speaking with an employee of a particular
program, the request will be granted, of
course. We hope to monitor the frequency
with which those requests are made.
Finally, by the end of the first year's
operation, we hope to be in a position to
measure the amount of money saved by
the city and state through the alternatives-
to-incarceration placements. This is a
of
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complex task, and we would be happy to
discuss a proper method for doing it.
Toward that end, I would be interested in
learning about the method you used to
estimate "the $3.6 million lost to the tax-
payers as a result of the drop in the
CASES' caseload."
Jerome E. McElroy
Executive Director
NYC Criminal Justice Agency
Sasha Abramsky replies:
I would like to stress that I did not
write this article in order to be a harbin-
ger of doom. McElroy's organization is
doing important work, and there are many
positive points to the new system. The fact
remains, however; that this major change
in the system was implemented before key
organizations set up to deal with it were
up and running. I did not say the problems
could not be rectified; but I did point out
the teething pains that concern many of
those involved in the criminal justice sys-
tem.1f these problems last beyond the first
several months, then confidence in the
system will be weakened.
As for judges being able to request
interviews with program representatives,
this is true. But it places the burden of
responsibility for seeking information on
the shoulders of judges, who may already
feel overburdened and who may now lack
the incentive to go the extra mile to sup-
port alternatives to incarceration. This is
dangerous, for it ends up turning incar-
ceration into the easy, time-saving option
for the judges.
The $3.6 million estimate comes from
observers of the system who compare the
expense of sending men and women to
prison rather than to alternatives to incar-
ceration. A conservative estimate to house
a person in a prison for six months is
$25,000, and a higher-end estimate to put
them through an alternative program is
$10,000. Because CASES had 240 fewer
participants added to its criminal court
ATI program last summer than during a
comparable period the year before, pre-
sumably 240 more people ended up in
prison. This translates into a conserva-
tively estimated loss to the taxpayer of
$3.6 million.
Of course, if the new system eventually
succeeds in increasing the number of par-
ticipants in alternative programs, this loss
could be quickly made up and converted
into a savings. Everyone will benefit if this
new system is soon running at full throttle-
before judges and prosecutors lose faith in
alternative-to-incarceration programs.
CITY LIMITS
Socialist Scene
Dreaming of a Red Christmas
W
orkers of the world unite! You
have nothing to lose but your
place in the buffet line!
Sure, the 300-plus stalwarts
who showed up for the U.S.
Communist Party's holiday party were scrambling
for free roasted chicken, rice and-of course-
Red Dog beer. And yes, there was a little proletar-
ian pushing and shoving by some of the ladies, but
everyone piped down once Gus Hall took his seat
at the rostrum.
Venerable in an oxblood cardigan and vermil-
ion tie, flanked by poinsettias, the longtime
leader of the CPUSA-and perennial presidential
candidate-pronounced his somewhat blue pre-
dictions for 1998. "Nature will continue on its
destructive path," he said. "The economic finan-
cial crises of Southeast Asia will spread to the
JANUARY 1998
U.S., Japan and Europe." The forecasts drew
polite applause from the faithful at the party hall
on 23rd Street.
But his prediction that the Republican majority
would fall in both houses of Congress evoked the
first truly lusty clapping from the crowd, many of
whom were old enough to have known John Reed
personally. Hall's pronouncement that the party
needs to convince lawmakers to adopt a Paul
Robeson commemorative postage stamp struck
especially close to their hearts, drawing a few
exhortations of "Tell 'em Gus."
Emboldened by their appreciation, Hall even
offered a Super Bowl prognostication: "The
Communist Party picks the Green Bay Packers
because they're the only team in professional foot-
ball with public ownership."
Like all holiday get-togethers, the Party's
party was a chance for old Gus Hall (center)
friends to keep in touch for strikes a Leninist
yet another year. After Hall pose on stage at
the U.S.
took his bows, they hit the Communist Party's
buffet again for chocolate holiday affair.
creme cups and coffee. "It's
nice to come by and see that no one I know
checked out this year," admitted Ethel Cohen
from the Bronx, who said she inherited her CP
membership from her parents. "I'm 80," she
added, "but it's the old ones who are the most
militant."
Her friend Pearl Ray, who braved a three-hour
express bus ride from Co-op City to make it down-
town, agreed. The two signaled their intention to
visit the coffee urn, but Ms. Cohen turned to add
one fmal point: "And, no, we didn't get discour-
aged about the U.S.S.R." -Glenn Thrush
Briem ............ ------........ --------------
c
Nepotism
Matronage
in Brooklyn
4.
son should be willing to do anything
for his mother, but East New York
school board member DeCosta
Headley, Jr. has taken familial fealty
one step farther: He's voted mama a
job as a lunchroom aide.
On Nov. 28, Headley and five other
Community School Board 19 members voted to
give Martha Berry a job at P.S. 328. To prevent
nepotism and corrupt hiring practices, the state
legislature stripped school boards of hiring power
earlier this year.
But the boards are still required to vote in, by a
two-thirds majority, any potential employee who
"is related within a third degree of consanguinity"
with a board member. Surprisingly, the regulation
contains no prohibition against members okaying
their relatives once the matter comes to a vote.
"It's absolutely crazy," admits one central
staffer at board headquarters.
Headley, the son of controversial Democratic
District Leader DeCosta Headley, Sr., says he
acted ethically. "I don't think there's anything
wrong with that," he told City Limits. "That's the
law. You vote. It happens all the time here with
board members. Several board members have
voted on family members."
Calls to District 19 Superintendent Robert
Riccobono, who initiated the appointment, were
not returned.
When asked if he ever considered recusing
himself, Headley responded, "No, it's just an aide
job assisting kids in the lunchroom."
This isn't the first time Headley's attitude
towards public sector paychecks has raised eye-
brows. Last summer he was dumped from
Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger's
staff after it was disclosed that he was double-dip-
ping by also working on the staff of Brooklyn
State Senator John Sampson. That practice was
not technically illegal, either. Headley is currently
an aide to Congressman Ed Towns, a close politi-
cal ally of his father.
-Glenn Thrush
Nieves Ayress (right), fellow squatters at 672 East 136th Street in Mott Haven and these support-
ers are outraged that the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) gave
residents the boot and seized their possessions. Although the vacate order still stands, a State
Supreme Court judge acknowledged that HPD hadn't filed the necessary papers or allowed resi-
dents enough time to respond. At press time, the deposed residents, some of whom had lived there
since 1982, were heading back into court to appeal their ouster.
-
Nonprofit Housing
VOA
Eviction
Plan is DOA
W
hen Bill B. returned to his small
room in the West 97th Street
SRO on Dec. I, he found an evic-
tion notice from Volunteers of
America, the nonprofit that runs
both the SRO and his drug and alcohol recovery
program. VOA claimed that Bill was back on the
bottle and, as a result, the letter ordered him to
"vacate your room immediately."
But Bill, who had lived at the site for most of
1997, denied the charges, and his fight forced
VOA, the city's largest housing services contrac-
tor, to change its supportive SRO housing policy.
At issue was VOA's order that residents, many of
them formerly homeless drug addicts and alco-
holics, sign an sub-leasing agreement promising
they would pack their bags if they violated house
rules. For most tenants, that means keeping away
from addictive substances.
But Bill's lawyers countered that the contract
was illegal since the tenants have the right of per-
manent tenancy guaranteed by rent stabilization
laws. Therefore, only a Housing Court judge
could evict Bill. 'These buildings are financed by
the city [for permanent housing) and they simply
can't use the building for transitional housing,"
says Betsy Kane, director of West Side SRO Law
Project, which represented Bill.
Under pressure from Kane and West Side
elected officials, the mammoth nonprofit, which
nets $60 million from the city each year, says it's
reversing course. "I admit there was an error in
Billy's case, but we're changing," says VOA's
Chief Program Officer, Terry Roberts. "[This)
probably shouldn't have happened. Each tenant
will probably have their own lease."
But the decision comes too late for some.
James Ramey, a VOA program director, acknowl-
edges that other tenants have gotten the boot under
the old policy, but none within the last year-
Kane's organization says the number is more like-
ly four in the past year. Until they can sort the sit-
uation out, VOA has rescinded its eviction decree,
although Bill has been ousted from the substance
abuse program.
The organization now denies that it ever
planned to really kick him out. "If the language [in
the eviction notice) sounded strong, it was because
we needed his attention," says VOA spokesperson
Debra Sanchez.-Joe Gould
CITY LIMITS
...... ----------.. ----------------Briem
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But after advocates took their case to City
Hall, DJJ backed down. "There has been a lot of
public criticism, especially from child advocates,"
says Sarina Roffe, a spokeswoman for DJJ, who
declined to give an exact shut-down date for the
lock-up. "City Hall originally made a promise,
and this administration is keeping that promise.
This [decision] came from the administration."
But the immediate trigger for the reversal
may have come from Albany. The state's youth
division, which had to okay the plan, reportedly
rejected the Spofford reprieve because it wasn't
WHO NEEDS
ACTION?
satisfied with the educational, training and
recreational program DJJ had designed for the
estimated 60 juvenile offenders who were slated
to remain there
Roffe says the city is seeking to expand its
nonsecured youth detention facilities and refer
more children to alternative-to-detention pro-
grams. "It was clear from the beginning DJJ was-
n't going to have the resources to maintain a facil-
ity like Spofford," says Darlene Jorif of the
Correctional Association of New York.
-Glenn Thrush
Spofford's
Locked
Down for
G o o d ~ The late, lamented ma.yoral election TU RN 0 UT BURN 0 UT
was a victory for the incumbent, but
democracy-small "d"-took a hell of
a pounding.
U
nder mounting pressure from advo-
cates and state officials, City Hall
has decided to keep its promise to
shut down the notorious Spofford
Juvenile Center by mid-1998-it
just won't say exactly when the widely reviled jail
will close.
In December, City Limits reported that the
Department of Juvenile Justice was planning to
keep the 289-bed facility in the South Bronx open
on a limited basis. That decision came because
two new 124-bed juvenile lock-ups, due to open
this spring, don't have enough space to accommo-
date the flood of young offenders into the system.
JANUARY 1998
The city Voter Assistance Commission's bleak breakdown of electoral turnout last
November paints a portrait of a city where white moderates and conservatives vote in ener-
getic blocs while poor and minority districts sta.y at home and suffer the consequences. In
Brooklyn, the city's most populous borough, a measly 31 percent of eligible voters in pre-
dominantly black or Latino assembly districts cast votes. In white districts more than 43
percent turned out.
But the very worst turnout in Brooklyn-and in the city at large-took place in districts
in which Democratic officials forsook Ruth Messinger and defected to the Giuliani camp. In
those areas just over a quarter of registered voters were motivated to go to the polls, com-
pared to an average of 40 percent citywide.
The very worst turnout in the city? Assemblyman Darryl Towns' East New York district-
an area dominated by Giuliani-loving Dems led by council members Priscilla Wooten and
Martin Malave-Dilan-Iogged an anemic 23.1 percent turnout. -Glenn Thrush

~
,
PIPELINE
The Harm Reduction
Care Network of
New Yorks Drew
Kramer says a
federal scamp of
approval would
boost local and state
needle exchange
support.
:M
Dreading the Needle
Research says needle exchanges save lives, but Congress doesn't want to hear it. Unless the Clinton
administration supports the programs, politics might trump public health. By Robin Campbell
T
here's nothing ambiguous about
the Family Research Council's
stance on needle exchange pro-
grams. The conservative
Washington think-tank warned
readers in a 1997 report that the federal
government is "on the verge of funding nee-
dle giveaways for drug addicts," describing
such an eventuality as a "tragic mistake."
The Clinton administration's position,
on the other hand, is much less clear.
Congressional efforts to prevent federal
funding of needle exchanges, wruch most
experts consider an important part of
efforts to stop the spread of HIV and AIDS,
are stuck in neutral for the moment. But the
administration's refusal to take advantage
of a wide-open opportunity to provide fed-
eral backing for needle exchanges is keep-
ing thousands of programs from expanding
their work.
In New York City, roughly 50 percent of
new HIV cases can be traced to intravenous
drug use, according to the Centers for
Disease Control (CDC). Most local
exchanges are eager for federal money to
extend their services to the estimated 80 per-
cent of intravenous drug users who currently
do not have adequate access to clean needles.
However, more than federal funding is
at stake for the estimated 80,000 to 200,000
at-risk intravenous drug users who live
here. Despite overwhelming proof that
needle exchanges succeed in preventing
the spread of mv, advocates say local and
state governments are often reluctant to
support them. The still-awaited federal
stamp of approval could help change that.
"Sending the appropriate public health
message is a very important step," says
Jane Silver, director of public policy at the
American Foundation for AIDS Research
(AMFAR). "It will give states and commu-
nities the information they need so they can
do what they can do."
Shalala'. Call
Providing clean needles to intravenous
drug users has always been controversial.
Congress erected the fIrst obstacle to feder-
al funding of exchange programs through a
restricti ve amendment on a 1988 AIDS bill.
But the latest hurdle was written into
the 1997 Omnibus Appropriations Act:
"No funds appropriated under tills Act shall
be used to carry out any program of dis-
tributing sterile needles for the hypodermic
injection of any illegal drugs," Congress
declared, "unless the Secretary of Health
and Human Services determines that such
programs are effective in preventing the
spread of HIV and do not encourage the
use of illegal drugs."
Evidence that providing access to clean
needles works as intended-without
increasing drug use-is readily available.
For example, the CDC reports that after the
Connecticut legislature legalized the sale
and possession of syringes without a pre-
scription in 1992, the rate of needle sharing
among intravenous drug users fell from 71
percent to 15 percent in three years without
increasing drug use.
Last February, after a three-day review
of existing studies and literature, an inde-
pendent conference of experts convened by
the National Institutes of Health endorsed
needle exchange programs as essential to
reducing behavioral risks for HIV and
AIDS and called for the restrictions on
exchanges to be lifted. ''This is a battle of
ideology versus science," says local
Congressman Jerrold Nadler, who is one of
the programs' most vocal advocates in the
House. "My support of needle exchange is
based on the simple fact that it saves lives."
But Shalala has refused to make the
declaration required by Congress. Victor
Zonano, a Health and Human Services
spokesperson, says the department has
made it clear that their [mdings show the
exchanges are effective in reducing HIV,
but they have withheld their endorsement
until they can prove exchanges don't
increase drug use. "It would do us no good
to certify and then be reversed by
Congress," he adds.
They may not get the chance. In
September, fearing Shalala might change
her mind and come out in favor of the pro-
grams, the House of Representatives
amended her agency's appropriations bill
and rescinded her right to make such a dec-
laration. After a similar measure failed in
the Senate, a conference committee com-
promise preserved the secretary's authori-
ty-but also placed a moratorium on feder-
CITY LIMITS

al funding for needle distribution until at
least March 31, 1998.
This temporary compromise has set the
stage for a renewed battIe this spring.
"Make no mistake, the opponents of needle
exchange programs have already declared
that they intend to codify the federal ban,"
Silver says. In October, several members
of the President's AIDS Advisory Council,
which recommended lifting the needle
exchange ban back in 1995, threatened to
resign if progress was not made soon. A
December report from the council called
the lack of federal funding for the pro-
grams the "most disturbing" aspect of fed-
eral HIV policy.
Exchange activists and lobbyists at
organizations such as AMFAR and the
National Association of People With AIDS
are pressuring Secretary Shalala to immedi-
ately exercise her authority. In September,
the National Coalition to Save Lives Now!
organized a demonstration outside Health
and Human Services headquarters that
drew 1,000 protestors.
Not everyone in the field agrees this
federal fight is the best strategy. Some
activists worry that pressuring the
President to seize the opportunity to fund
needle exchanges could backfire and hand
his opponents an issue that is easy to politi-
cize. Others fear that federal funds would
come wrapped in burdensome regulations.
A. Legltlmat. Shot
Drew Kramer, director of the Harm
Reduction Care Network of New York,
says the money is a secondary concern,
however. "The critical issue is for
Secretary Shalala to put the Health and
Human Services stamp of approval on
syringe exchanges as good public health,"
he asserts, because that would likely free
up other resources.
Part of government's reluctance to sup-
port needle exchanges-let alone fund
them--comes from right-wing pressure
(see "Needle Point, Counterpoint") but the
programs' outlaw roots may also be a fac-
tor. Before 1992, most needle exchanges in
New York were initiated by members of
the radical AIDS group ACT UP. But in the
last five years, more than 51,000 drug
users have received syringes from autho-
rized exchanges across the state. By giving
the programs greater legitimacy, federal
officials could also help open up resources
from other levels of government.
A case in point is a New York State
Assembly bill introduced by Assemblyman
Richard Gottfried, which, like the 1992
Connecticut law, seeks to legalize the sale
and possession of needles. In the seven
JANUARY 1998
years since Gottfried's bill was first intro-
duced in Albany, it has never even come up
for a vote. ''The politics of this is ue make
people jittery, and they don't know how to
handle it," says Richard Conti, senior leg-
islative aide to the assemblyman. ''That's
why we haven't gotten a vote on it."
Gottfried says interest in his legislation
has grown in recent years, but he admits,
''The federal reluctance to participate [in
needle exchange programs] certainly gives
credence to the opposition's arguments."
Similar trouble has dogged pro-
exchange efforts on Staten Island, where
59 percent of HIV cases can be traced to
intravenous drug use, according to Wendy
Hoefler, former coordinator of the Staten
Island HIV Care Network. In December,
the Republican Steering Committee of the
New York State Assembly held a hearing
to debate the borough's first proposed nee-
dle exchange program. "One of the things
[Assemblyman Robert] Straniere kept say-
ing over and over again was, 'The federal
government hasn't come out in favor of
this, '" she says. The panel was one of
many political attacks on the proposed pro-
ject-which, after two years of effort, has
yet to get underway .
Robin Campbell is a fonner reporter for
The Staten Island Advance.
Needle Point, Counterpoint
M
ost needle exchange programs operate from store fronts or street comers on
regular but limited weekly schedules. New York Harm Reduction Educators, one of
the oldest and largest of the city's nine authorized exchanges (there are at least
two others that operate underground), serves approximately 4,000 participants each year
out of vans that travel to six locations in East Harlem and the Bronx. According to Executive
Director Terry Ruefli, more than half of these participants have tested positive for HIV.
Drew Kramer of the Harm Reduction Care Network says the participants vary depending
upon the program. For example, many of The Positive Health Prqject's participants are low-
income transgender people on the West Side of Manhattan who use syringes to illiect illegal
hormones. And Moving Equipment, an underground exchange, travels to locations in Red
Hook, Coney Island, Bushwick and East New York, serving very low-income people of color.
According to a poll conducted at the end of November by the Kaiser Family Foundation, an
independent national health care philanthropy, 61 percent of Americans favor allowing state
and local governments to use federal funds for needle exchange programs.
But opponents are extraordinarily vocal. Nancy Sosman, a former member of Manhattan
Community Board 3, has mounted a crusade against the Lower East Side Harm Reduction
Center that has earned her coverage from the CongreSSional Record to The New York Times
Magazine.
"I don't think the issue is AIDS and HIV. In my opinion, it's about drugs," Sosman says,
adding that she thinks the advocates, including philanthropist George Soros and many uni-
versity researchers, have a hidden agenda. "The bottom line is, they want to legalize drugs
because then they can be the entities that manufacture and produce what they call 'safer
drugs,' so they can be the ones who get rich otfthe drug trade."
Needle exchange activists counter that their work helps extend serviceS-including drug
rehabilitation-to notoriously hard-to-reach populations. Ninety-eight percent of the pro-
grams provide drug rehab referrals, according to Dr. Denise Paone, assistant director of
research at the Chemical Dependency Institute of Beth Israel Medical Center. Her study of
New York City's exchanges shows the frequency of illiection among participants has fallen
by 8 percent.
That doesn't convince opponents like Robert L Maginnis of the Family Research Council,
who claims needle exchange programs "coddle addicts." In a 1996 council report, he
endorsed an alternative solution. "On April 2, 1995, Saudi Arabia beheaded three drug
smugglers," he wrote. "A little earlier, Singapore did the same. There are no needle
exchange programs in Riyadh and few addicts on Singapore's streets. Neither country has
an AIDS epidemic."-RC
3
The Fed's Bad Credit Report
PIPEliNE ~
Activists are disappointed with the new CRA small business loan database. Still, they're
finding ways to bring more credit to poor neighborhoods. By Carl Vogel
,
R
oberto Hiciano had to go to
loan sharks for capital to start
his video production company
in Washington Heights several
years ago because he couldn't
get a conventional loan. "Loan sharking in
Washington Heights is a booming business,
and they charge up to 5 percent interest per
week," says Mark Levine, president of the
Neighborhood Trust Federal Credit Union,
which serves this uptown Manhattan
neighborhood.
Credit card companies and banks
turned Hiciano down again last year when
he needed $4,000 for an editing machine,
but by this time Levine's nonprofit credit
union was up and running. Now, Hiciano is
building his credit rating as he makes pay-
ments to Neighborhood Trust-and he has-
n't missed one yet.
Small businesses are the unsung driving
force of New York City's economy.
According to City Comptroller Alan
Hevesi's office, small firms-those with
fewer than 500 employees-have added
more than four times as many jobs city-
wide as larger companies since 1993. In
Brooklyn, which suffered from an 11.1 per-
cent unemployment rate in 1997, small
firms have added nearly 12,000 jobs over
the last four years, while large firms lost
4,500 positions.
Getting a start-up or expansion loan
can be critical for a company's survival,
and community financiers such as Levine
work hard to provide capital in otherwise
disinvested neighborhoods. Without ade-
quate data, it hasn't been easy for them to
gauge if New York's traditional banks red-
line businesses in poor neighborhoods,
however.
In October, the job of tracking loans in
the inner city was supposed to get a little
easier, as small business lending data
became available for the first time in accor-
dance with recent revisions of the federal
Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). But
neighborhood activists aren't jumping out
of their chairs to get hold of the new data-
base. Word got out that the contents
weren't particularly useful or illuminating.
Looking for PatMrns
Anyone familiar with affordable hous-
ing knows about the two federal laws that
revolutionized finance in low- and moder-
Six Mew York Melghborhoods
The Strips
TltalLeus
Number
Chelsea in Manhattan: 23rd Street, between 1,1&1
3rd and 8th avenues
Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn: Court Street
I- .....
between Baltic Street and Hamilton Avenue
Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn: Fulton Street between ..
...
Franklin and ostrand avenues
Washington Heights in Manhattan: 181st Street a .,..,.
between Bennett and Amsterdam avenues
Harlem in Manhattan: 125th Street between iii $3,381,010
1st and St. Nicholas avenues
Jackson Heights in Queens: 37th Street 48
......
between 83rd and 92nd avenues
ate-income neighborhoods: the
Community Reinvestment Act and the
Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. CRA
requires banks to serve all communities
where they receive deposits; HMDA
makes detailed information on an individ-
ual banks' mortgage loans available to the
public. Together, the laws help community
groups monitor housing lending patterns.
When government regulators review a
bank's CRA ratings, activists can provide
well-informed critiques of its records-
and challenge a merger or expansion. As a
result, banks have been prompted to make
billions of dollars in housing loans in low-
and moderate-income communities.
Congress added small business lending
to the list of banks' CRA responsibilities
when it revised the act in 1995, but lenders
managed to block legislators from creating
rigorous new reporting requirements.
"While we won on many points, we lost
most of the fight on small business lend-
ing," acknowledges John Taylor, the presi-
dent and CEO of the National Community
Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) in
Washington, D. C.
For individual banks, the new database
A note on the numbers: The only way to look at small business loans in any specific commercial strip using the CRA data is in aggregate-all the loans
made by all the lenders. Of the six districts we chose to sample from the database, it's not surprising that the four census tracts containing the booming
business center along Manhattan's 23rd Street received the most loans. The fact that Brooklyn's mostly white Carroll Gardens and mostly black Bedford-
Stuyvesant neighborhoods have a roughly similar lending history for the smallest firms is notable, although the data doesn't reveal the race of the busi-
ness owners or if they live in the community. Other non-white and low-income communities didn't fare nearly as well.
10M
CITY LIMITS
lists the total number of loans-and the
total amount loaned-in each county of the
United States. But it breaks down the data
by census tracts only after combining infor-
mation from all the banks, so it's impossi-
ble to determine whether a specific bank is
ignoring potential borrowers in a specific
neighborhood. So while it is possible to see
how many loans were made by all lenders
in Washington Heights, for example, it's
impossible to know how well any specific
bank is servicing that community.
"Grassroots, effective CRA activism is
about particular neighborhoods. That's
what makes it real for people," says
Matthew Lee, executive director of Inner
City PresS/Community on the Move, a
Bronx-based group that helps prepare chal-
lenges to banks under CRA. ''This takes
much of the juice out of it."
Users are also limited as to which banks
they can keep an eye on: The law only
requires the largest one-fifth of all lenders
nationwide to report. And while HMDA
data include the total number of mortgage
applications, this database does not, an
impediment to community groups that want
to see not only how many loans were grant-
ed, but how many were denied.
HMDA also reports the loan applicant's
race. But banks aren't allowed to note the
owner's race on small business loan appli-
cations. The rule was originally intended to
protect borrowers against racial bias, but it
makes it nearly impossible to hold banks
accountable for business redlining. "A lot
of people would like to see that change,"
admits Mark Schultz, a senior financial
analyst for the Federal Reserve Board,
which collects and publishes the CRA data.
Trouble with Cnclit
Advocates say more detailed data
would make it easier to illustrate how
banks' standard operating procedures tend
to limit business lending in non-white
neighborhoods.
"We tell banks, if you have blinders on
when you look in our community's direc-
tion, you're not going to accomplish much.
Ninety percent of the businesses in this
community have trouble with credit," says
Herman Valazquez, the executive director
of BRISC, the small business assistance
arm of the Upper Manhattan Em-
powerment Zone Development Corp.
Valazquez acknowledges that a signifi-
cant number of businesses seeking credit in
Harlem aren't a good risk for a bank loan
because of inadequate bookkeeping and
other problems. But he and others are not
asking banks to make loans that will go
into default. They just want recognition
JANUARY 1998
The
Banks
Three Mew York Banks
(aJ] dollar Ijgures in thousands)
The Chase Manhattan Bank* $3&,&13,000
Citibank NA ~
Marine Midland Bank $4,48'1"

In New York City as a whole, 36 percent of the census tracts were designated as low- or moderate-income in
1990. Without being able to analyze the loans anyone bank has made in any specific community, activists
are limited to judging banks at a county level-for the chart above, New York City's five counties were con-
solidated. Some bugs in the new database make rigorous analysis difficult, even at the county-wide level,
however. For example, The Chase Manhattan Bank is listed alphabetically under the letter " T. "
*This does not include $3,617,000 in loans made or purchased by affiliates, o/which 25 percent were in low-
and moderate-income census tracts.
that the credit history of someone fighting
to start a business in a poor neighborhood
might not portray them in the best light on
a computer credit scoring system.
"Anyone who says CRA is about
throwing good money at bad loans hasn't
read the statutes. It's loaning within the
bounds of sound banking practices," says
Sarah Ludwig, executive director of the
Neighborhood Economic Development
Advocacy Project. "[But) there definitely
needs to be more access to small business
loans, there's no question of that."
Access to capital doesn't have to be
through the bank itself. Typically,
microloans like Hiciano's aren't handled
by a bank because the administrative costs
are too high-nonetheless banks are a key
part of the process. For example, Levine's
credit union is supported by more than $2
million in bank deposits.
But the new CRA data doesn't include
any information about bank participation in
microloan funds. Nor does it count busi-
ness loans secured with personal home
mortgages.
On the other hand, much of what is
included serves to muddy any analysis. For
example, loans of less than $1 million are
counted as small business loans-a huge
category-and companies' lines of credit
are also counted, whether or not the firms
actually borrow money. Furthermore, while
the database does note how many loans
went to businesses with less than $l million
in gross annual revenues, it is impossible to
know whether or not the owner is a local
resident. 'There's no information on the
business owner, so you don't know if a loan
is going to a Boston Market franchise or a
local grocery store," says Josh Silver,
NCRC's vice president of research.
Another Front
Still, NCRC and groups around the
country have started to explore what can be
accomplished with this database. "It has its
limitations, but community groups can
develop benchmarks of what is the average
amount of community development lend-
ing for a Docal) bank," Silver suggests.
"Say a bank is underperforming compared
to its peers. A community organizer in the
Bronx can say, 'You're about $20 million
behind your peers. For you to get up to
speed for your CRA exam, we have a piece
of abandoned property and a willing buyer,
but we need to get enough credit to make
the deal fly. '"
Groups across the country have started
to include the data when commenting on a
bank's eRA record. In Chicago late last
year, for example, the Woodstock Institute
used the small business data as part of an
investigation ofTwin Cities Federal, which
had placed a bid to buy a portion of Bank
of America's local business.
If activists can make a convincing case
that there's a problem, government exam-
iners can investigate further-banks must
submit much more detailed information to
the Federal Reserve than what is released
to the public.
Meanwhile, community development
practitioners and CRA advocates predict
that, because the data's many shortcomings
are so abundant, it may be only a matter of
time before the regulations are strength-
ened. "Clearly we can't rest until this is
changed," Taylor says .
-,
. BankersTrust Company
Community Development Group
A resource for the non .. profit
development community

Gary Hattem, Managing Director
Amy BrusHoff, Vice President
130 Liberty Street
10th Floor
New York, New York 10006
Tel: 212-250-7118 Fax: 212-250-8552
The NYS Homeless Housing and Assistance Corporation (HHAC) and the NYS Office
of Temporary and Disability Assistance will provide funds under the 1997-98 Request for
Proposals (RFP) for the Homeless Housing and Assistance Program (HHAP).
Under HHAP, grants and loans are provided to acquire, construct and rehabilitate
housing for persons who are or would otherwise be homeless. Eligible projects
may provide permanent, transitional or emergency supportive housing to
homeless single individuals or families, including such special needs populations
as mentally disabled persons and persons with AIDS.
Not-for-profit corporations and their subsidiaries and charitable organizations,
as well as municipalities, public corporations, and public housing authorities are
eligible to apply for HHAP funding.
All applications must be submitted by 5:00 p.m. on February 23,1998 to:
e-
Bureau of Supported Housing Development
488 Broadway - Room 201
Albany, NY 12243
For copies of the RFP and further information, please call (518) 432-0105.
N e ~ Y o r k
Lav#yers
for the
Public
Interest
provides free legal referrals for
community-based and non-profit groups
seeking pro bono representation.
Projects include corporate, tax
and real estate work, zoning advice, housing
and employment discrimination,
environmental justice,
disability and civil rights.
For further information,
call NYLPI at
(212) 727-2270.
There is no charge
for NYLPI's services.
CITY LIMITS

Parental Dissent
New school-based councils might be the last chance for community control of local schools,
but activists are worried the school board isn't interested in their input. By Jordan Moss
W
hile the New York
State legislature's pas-
sage of school gover-
nance reform last
January drained much
of the power from the city' s elected-and
often corrupt and inefficient-communi-
ty school boards, political leaders
promised one important sector of the
community a new vehicle for wielding
influence in the schoolhouse. Parents,
they said, would join with teachers and
administrators to serve on school-based
leadership councils.
But when it came to determining what
these councils might actually do, the
politicians failed to put anything in writ-
ing. The reform law includes only a single
clause defining who should take part on
the planned governance councils-"par-
ents and school personnel"-and mentions
nothing about how they will implement
their decisions. It doesn't even say what
kind of decisions they might have the
authority to make.
All this was left to the office of Schools
Chancellor Rudy Crew to decide. And in
the 12 months since the law passed, the
Board of Education has angered many par-
ent advocates, who say the process of
drafting school council regulations is tak-
ing too long and has lacked grassroots
input. While promises of better outreach
by the board have left some activists more
hopeful, many remain wary.
As the clock ticks, activists are worried
that their chance to help shape the coun-
cils' final form is slipping away. "Once the
regulations are approved and the system is
implemented, if it's not a real well-defined
strategic plan, then the school system is
just too big [to make the councils work],"
says Munir Abdul Hakim, father of two
students in Coney Island's District 21 and
a member of the Community Campaign
for Good Schools, a citywide coalition of
parent activists and nonprofits. "This is a
one-shot deal ."
Parent Participation
At stake in the regulations Crew is draft-
ing is the extent to which the system will
encourage meaningful parent participation
in school decision-making. "People don't
JANUARY 1998
look at parents as educators, but we are,"
says Diane Lowman of Mothers on the
Move, a Hunts Point-based parents group.
"Parents are the first educators."
Many activists are fighting for parents
to constitute at least 50 percent of the coun-
cils' membership. "Too many within the
system don't want parents orga-
nized and informed," says Ayo
Harrington, president of the
United Parents Associations, a
citywide coalition of parent
associations in the public
schools, who adds that she
thinks teachers and administra-
tors are often too ready to dis-
count the concerns of active par-
ents.
Her concerns are rooted in
experience. The city has experi-
mented with voluntary school-
based councils since 1990, and
in 1994 then-State Education
Commissioner Thomas Sobol
made councils mandatory
statewide with the New
Compact for Learning's Section
100.11.
When these "100.11" coun-
cils work well, parents report a
collegial atmosphere that pro-
motes respect for the expertise
the different players-parents,
teachers and the principal-
bring to the table. For example,
when parents at the Bronx New
School-an alternative school in
District 100were disappointed
in third grade math scores, they
urged staff to address the prob-
lem: The following year the
school did appreciably better.
But under New York City
Board of Education guidelines,
teachers were guaranteed a majority of
seats on the 100.11 councils. And parent
advocates say that when school staff con-
trols the councils, parents are often unable
to get much done.
What's more, without the rule of law
behind them, the 100.11 councils usually
have been ignored. 'The majority of schools
complied with 100.11 in a token manner,"
says John C. Fager, acting executive director
of the Parents Coalition, an advocacy organi-
zation. Fager says rus experience on the
school council of the Bronx High School of
Science is all too telling. "We met six times
a year for 45 minutes each in the middle of
the day," he says. "Every teacher on the
council said to me, 'This isn' t serious. If it
was, we'd go on a retreat and define what we
want done and set up some committees.'"
Degree of Authority
Crew's regulations-originally sched-
uled to be presented to the state legislature
this month, but now due in April-could
possibly increase parental authority, if only
because Assembly Education Committee
Chair Steven Sanders and Board of
PIPELI NE i
,
Parents from the
Community
Campaign for Good
Schools protested the
Board of Education s
poor planning of the
new school councils.
Me

-
Education President William Thompson
support parity between parents and staff on
the councils. A preliminary outline of "key
principles," drafted by Deputy Schools
Chancellor Harry Spence, says there will
be a "balance of school staff and parent
members."
Aside from the councils' structure, the
other big question is their degree of
authority. Although some parents would
like the councils to have the power to hire
and ftre principals and veto power over
major budgetary and curriculum decisions,
most campaign participants just want prin-
cipals to be more accountable and have a
greater stake in collaborating with parents.
"What makes the principal want to get
involved and share decisions if he's not
going to be held accountable for it, if there
aren't going to be any repercussions?"
asks Carleton Gordon, a freshman member
of Community School Board 13 in
Brooklyn's Fort Greene neighborhood.
Beginning last spring, Deputy
Chancellor Spence and other officials held a
series of meetings with representatives
from the Community Campaign for Good
Schools, which insisted parents be included
in the planning process for Crew's proposed
regulations. The group was consulted on a
draft outline, and Spence promised the
board would seek broad parent participation
in a series of community forums. But as the
School Board's original January deadline
loomed, officials cut the number of planned
forums from 50 down to a mere dozen.
Members of the campaign were furi-
ous. With some adept lobbying, they con-
vinced the state to extend the Board of
Education's deadline for presenting the
plan to April 30. And the board now plans
to host a total of 40 forums.
Barely PubllclzH
Still, campaign participants say the few
forums that had occurred as of mid-
December were by invitation only and
barely publicized. Many active parent
association presidents and school board
members say they were never formally
notified. Dozens more forums facilitated
by Brown University's Northeast Regional
Lab are scheduled for early this year. But
with such poor outreach, activists fear all
of them will be poorly attended and that
parents who do take part will have little
understanding of the issues. "They' re
going to go into these meetings and not
know what's at stake," says Lowman, who
is also a member of the campaign.
Specializing in
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Low .. Cost Insurance and Quality Service.
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270 North Avenue, New Rochelle, NY 10801

In protest, the campaign held a press
conference in Brooklyn outside a forum
held at Midwood's Edward R. Murrow
High School in early December. Parents
taped their mouths shut and carried signs
that read, "Good parents should be seen
and not heard." Spence invited the protest-
ers in, but their goal was to bring two mil-
lion parents in out of the cold, not just the
30 or so assembled on that day.
Inside, Hakim reports, the meeting
comprised a few official speeches and then
small group sessions. "Parents were really
outnumbered," he says. "I sat in on three
or four of the smaller groups, and I saw
only one group where parents were giving
a lot of input. They didn't seem to know
enough to engage in deep discussion about
these core principles."
"We're doing everything we can to
encourage meaningful parent involve-
ment," counters Ann Horowitz, Spence's
senior assistant, who adds that it's unreal-
istic to expect a one-size-fits-all blueprint.
"I envision now a plan that gives bound-
aries around how teams can form them-
selves. But it isn't a cut-and-dried, step-
by-step process."
Critics say this vagueness raises the
specter that the new councils will be no
more effective than those created under the
old "100.11" system. It's "an excuse for
schools and districts not to do a whole lot,
which was the problem with 100.11 in the
fust place," says Kavitha Mediratta, co-
director of the Community Involvement
Program at the NYU Institute for
Education and Social Policy.
Vague on the Details
Another question still to be determined
is whether there will be adequate funding
for parent training once the councils are
fmally up and running in October 1999, as
required by law. The law requires training
but is again vague on the details.
"If you' re going to do this right, it will
need a lot of work. If it's just handing out
a packet and saying, 'You' re trained,' well,
that's not real," says William Perkins, the
newly elected City Council member from
Harlem's 9th District and Assemblyman
Sander's former assistant on education.
In the end, parents contend, it's all
about making schools better. "Once the
system gets over the fear of parents having
a larger role in the schools, then we can
start to work together," Hakim says. "And
we' ll start to see some real improvement
in the public school system."
Jordan Moss is editor of the Norwood
News, a Bronx community paper.
CITY LIMITS
Immigrant Song and Dance
Green-card holders and other legal residents in need of food assistance are caught
in a bureaucratic tangle at the city welfare agency. By Jason Stipp
O
n the morning of September
ll , Dora M., a 59-year-old
imrnjgrant from Ecuador,
took a two-and-a-half-mjle
bus trip from her home in
Bushwick to the public assistance office
on DeKalb Avenue. She carried a manila
folder filled with tax. returns, some more
than to years old, that her daughter had
tracked down from Dora's estranged hus-
band, who lives upstate in Saratoga.
Like all legal irnntigrants in New York,
Dora had to reapply for food stamps
because of new federal and state laws. She
hoped tills day would be the end of a three-
month struggle to get back on the food
stamp rolls after having been cut off with-
out explanation in June, a termination that
never should have happened. Andrew
Friedman and Oona Chatterjee from Make
the Road by Walbng, a welfare assistance
group that represented Dora in her
attempts to reopen her case, met her in
front of the building.
After checbng in, the three wruted on
molded plastic chairs under flickering flu-
orescent lights while Dora's caseworker
photocopied the tax docu-
ments. When the worker rud-
n't return for over 30 min-
utes, Chatterjee went across
the street and called the city
director of food stamp pro-
grams. Finally, an hour and a
half later, the office manager
agreed to draft a letter restor-
ing Dora's benefits. In some-
tillng resembling English, the
notice read:
" .. .lnaddition, the docu-
ments submitted has also pro-
vided your food stamps
household with sufficient
qualifying work quarters.
Upon the completion of the
case review ... you will receive
the decision notice by postal
delivery ......
For welfare rights
activists across the city, tills
Kafkaesque tale is just one in
a volume of stories about
unlawful terminations, end-
less backlogs and frustrating
recertification delays as the
JANUARY 1998
Human Resources Administration (HRA)
struggles to steer its massive bureaucracy
through the strruts of welfare reform and
complicated new regulations for immi-
grants.
The 1996 federal welfare act cut food
stamp rud to all legal immigrants except
those who can prove they have worked to
years in the United States, been granted
asylum, or are refugees or veterans of the
U.S. Army. According to the New York
Immigration Coalition, 110,000 legal per-
manent residents were supposed to lose
their food stamps citywide.
The state legislature and Governor
Paffib ameliorated some of the impact last
August, approving the Food Assistance
Program (FAP) to restore food stamps for
legal irnntigrants who are' over 60, under
18 or disabled. Under FAP, New York City
is putting 60,000 legal residents back on
the rolls. Yet FAP still leaves 50,000 able-
bodied adult immigrants without rud. City
caseworkers simply don't understand the
new rules clearly enough or are unwilling
to make the effort to comply with them,
critics say.
"The laws are changing, there are too
many clients, and there is very little [social
service] support for them," FriedIJ1an says,
charging that HRA workers are inclined to
take the path of least resistance to avoid
trouble.
Others don't place as much blame on
the city as on the timetable for implemen-
tation. "At a poHcy level, the city is trying
to make sense of the legislation and get
information out to the fronthne workers,"
says Margie McHugh of the New York
Immigration Coalition. "The fact is, the
system cannot tum on a dime."
Vigilant Advocat
Many of Make the Road by Walking's
recent cases are related to the city's imple-
mentation of new food stamp legislation,
according to Friedman and Chatterjee,
both NYU law students in their 20s.
Founded in Bushwick in April 1997, the
group is housed in a drafty warren of
rooms in St. Barbara's Roman Cathohc
Church. The group holds workshops on
Wednesday afternoons to gujde clients
through the pitfalls of the welfare system.

PIPEliNE t
,
Andrew Friedman
(left) of Make the
Road by Walking
holds weekly coun-
seling sessions to
help immigrants
understand their
rights under the flew
welfare system.
B
"People who have vigilant advocates
may get aid, but the process is very slow,"
Chatterjee says. "People without advo-
cates are in danger of being railroaded."
Dora could have been one of them. She
separated from her husband in the mid-
1970s and has received government food
assistance for much of the time since,
while raising three children by herself. She
also held a low-wage job at a Jamaica,
Queens, doll factory.
When Dora was notified that her food
stamps would be cut off, Dora's oldest
child, who works for a youth services
organization in Bushwick, referred her to
Make the Road by Walking. The group
filed for a fair hearing with the state
Department of Social Services-but Dora
needed her husband's tax returns along
with her own to document a total of 10
years of work history in order to qualify
for food stamps. This was no easy task.
Although HRA is supposed to help Dora
find the documents she needs to prove her
eligibility, Maggie was the one who, after
making phone calls to relatives and
friends, finally located her father and
obtained the records Dora needed.
On September 29, after four months
without aid, Dora received $340 in back
food stamps. But it took several weeks and
phone calls to the welfare center before her
caseworker faxed Make the Road by
Walking official notification that Dora had
finally been placed back on the food stamp
rolls.
$95 and a Dream
Bombard" with Information
Such complicated cases have put a
strain on neighborhood welfare advocacy
groups, many of which received no extra
city funding to sort through these immi-
grants' complex cases with their bewil-
dered clients. Roxana Sosa, nutrition coor-
dinator at RAICES, an agency serving
elderly Hispanic immigrants in Brooklyn,
says about half of the cases the organiza-
tion currently handles are related to the
new food stamp laws.
"The transition has not been easy at
all," she says. "The problem with the local
[food stamp) offices is that they were
bombarded with information [about immi-
grant eligibility), and if the HRA supervi-
sor can't keep up, how can we expect the
client to know?"
She maintains that some of HRA's let-
ters to immigrant households were unclear
and written only in English. "When [legal
residents) went into their centers, they
couldn' t understand why their food stamps
were being decreased," she says. "We had
to translate for them and explain what the
new laws entail."
HRA's public affairs office failed to
return repeated phone calls, but City Limits
obtained several internal memos written
by Burton Blaustein, deputy commissioner
of income support, which portray an
agency scrambling to do a massive task on
a minuscule timetable. A September 2
memo indicated that centers were to desig-
nate just two days in the following week
T
hough the state's Food Assistance Program is generally considered a good faith effort to restore food
stamps to the city's most vulnerable immigrants, a requirement that applicants seek citizenship has
been hard for some to digest.
A memo sent to income support center directors from HRA Deputy Commissioner Burton Blaustein stated
that individuals eligible for FAP aid must seek citizenship within 30 days of filing for assistance. For the city
and state, the urgency is fiscal: If the 60,000 immigrants eligible for state aid become citizens, they can then
receive federally subsidized assistance. For now, however, the city must foot the bill for half of FAP's benefits
to elderly and disabled immigrants at a cost of $26 million next year, according to the city's Independent
Budget Office. The state covers the rest.
So far, all the city requires is that legal immigrants applying for food stamps visit one of six Citizenship
NYC offices, where a worker will verify that they have made an appointment to file for citizenship. Currently,
this verification alone is enough to push paperwork forward at HRA.
Margie McHugh of the New York Immigration Coalition, however, fears that if the citizenship requirement
becomes more stringent, legal residents may be set up to fail. "To force people to apply for citizenship if they
haven't had the proper training or classes would be a waste of [the applicant's] money," she says. "If citi-
zenship is so explicitly tied to benefits, it cheapens the whole process."
What's more, an application for citizenship costs $95. Advocates describe it as a kind of welfare mainte-
nance tax.-JS
(M
for workers to review their entire case-
loads and determine food stamp eligibility
for all legal resident cases. Anyone found
ineligible was to be dropped by September
30,1997.
Advocates say this wasn't nearly
enough time to do a good job. "It was
unrealistic to think that implementation
could happen by ... even October 1," says
Liz Krueger of the Community Food
Resource Center, an organization con-
tracted by the city to, among other
things, assist legal immigrants with wel-
fare and food stamp applications. "It
could take months just to fix the mistakes
that have occurred since implementation
began."
The Community Food Resource Center
received so many complaints that the staff
took the extraordinary measure of
preprinting fair hearing request forms for
immigrants with food stamp problems.
BichHa Pham of the Hunger Action
Network says that after the Food
Assistance Program passed, her organiza-
tion urged HRA to mail information to
immigrants who may have fell through the
cracks. "How many may be eligible for
food stamps and don't even know it?" she
asks. ''Their files weren't coded to indicate
[who these people might be]. They told us,
'We' d just be guessing. '"
For people still in the system, Krueger
says the city has been trying harder in
recent weeks. As implementation contin-
ues, most eligible immigrants have at least
begun the process of transferring from fed-
eral to state aid, she says. "We are still get-
ting complaints, but the huge sense of vol-
ume is not in our face the same way [as
when implementation began]."
The Other 50,000
For legal residents like Dora, there is
an end to the bureaucratic maze, but
50,000 other able-bodied legal immigrants
between 18 and 59 years old have no enti-
tlements left to fight for, and they're left
wondering where to go for food.
For many immigrants, the only option
may be to try and exchange their green
cards for full-fledged citizenship, though
this road has its own pitfalls (see "$95 and
a Dream"). Friedman says many immi-
grants now feel that it is critically impor-
tant to take these steps to protect their
rights and retain their welfare benefits. It's
a decision even Dora is considering.
"I think things will get better if I
become a citizen," Friedman translates for
her. "I've heard citizens are treated with
more respect."
CITY L I ~ I T C ;
i
Dolores (Dee) Solomon in her
newly renovated shop,
Dee's Cards N Wedding Service.
CALL: CHASE COMMUNITY
DEVELOPMENT COMMERCIAL
LENDING 212-622-4248
Moving in the right direction
Happy Renovation Dee!
When Dolores (Dee) Solomon went after a much need-
ed loan to keep her struggling small business compet-
itive, she thought it was a "mission impossible." And it
was. Then Thelma Russell, her long-time branch man-
ager at The Chase Manhattan Bank branch at 125th
Street, connected her to the right people.
Thelma personally introduced Dolores to the business
lending officers of the Chase Community Development
Group. Working one-on-one as a team, they cus-
tomized a loan package for Dolores. They did it with
Chase's flexible "CAN*DO" lending program which
makes special allowances for the credit challenges
facing many community-based businesses.
Dolores got her loan and business has never been bet-
ter. Stop by her shop at 480 Lenox Avenue and see for
yourself, or call her at 212-281-5125. It just goes to
show you: success is still all about making the right
relationships.
L ................... ...... ~ Community Development Group
CHASE. The right relationship is everything. SM
e 1997 The Chase Manhattan Bank. Member FDIC.
lIa,or lilliali bas a ,isiol of a laldlillfree Statel Islald b, tbe
slated for lIassile lew waterlrolt tralSfer statiols are lot &bolt
CITY LIMITS
T
he new millennium is approaching, as are predictions of
Biblical-scale natural disasters and global phenomena of
a bizarre and extreme nature. In New York City, politi-
cians are promising something nearly as cataclysmic: the closing of
the Fresh Kills landfill, the largest garbage dump in the world, a
dross heap so vast it is visible from outer space.
The date scheduled for Fresh Kills' finale is lan. 1,2002, which
just happens to be the day Mayor Rudolph Giuliani leaves office. Talk
about your parting gifts. Before the next mayor moves into Gracie
Mansion, the city will have to find a new home for the 13,000 tons of
residential trash New Yorkers discard every day.
By then, however, Mayor Giuliani has promised to have the
problem wrapped up. Here's the plan: The city will ship most of the
trash far away, probably to Virginia, in big, privately owned barges.
Yet in order to do this, the city must set up several transfer sta-
tions--enclosed garbage dumps-in waterfront neighborhoods to
provide staging areas where tons of trash can be stored until the
boats come to scoop it up. The city's preliminary plans reveal that
the nominees' selected for this honor are among the poorest and most
environmentally blighted communities in Brooklyn and the Bronx.
They include residential neighborhoods that are already home
to some of the city's highest levels of pollution: Greenpoint-
Williamsburg, Sunset Park, Red Hook and Hunts Point.
And that could be Rudy's biggest problem.
These communities, along with Southeast Queens, currently
house more than half of the city's 85 private waste transfer stations,
sites which have a less than clean record for honest and sanitary oper-
ation. Now these neighborhoods, along with a seasoned coalition of
environmental and advocacy groups, are vowing to fight against the
mayor's plan with every resource they have. Usually that's not saying
much. But local environmental campaigns have a nasty history of
beating City Hall. If communities can re-employ the stalling strategy
they used to kill the proposed Brooklyn Navy Yard incinerator plan
five years ago, they have a good chance to halt this plan.
"This is the real battle," says Yolanda Garcia, executive direc-
tor of Nos Quedamos, a Bronx-based community planning group
that is part of a coalition of garbage-targeted neighborhoods.
"Everybody's organizing now, spreading the word. We cannot be
tilDe be lea,es CitJ BaD. Bit lbe balf dozel co_DiUes
A private waste
management
company has big
plans for Red
Hook's Erie Basin.
to let lbellSel,es get d.-ped 01. by James Bradley
JANUARY 1998
Proposals to put a
waste transfer
facility on the Bay
Ridge waterfront
have already gal-
vanized a neigh-
borhood adept at
winning land-use
wars.
the sacrificial lambs for the rest of the region."
The dimensions of this conflict will become a lot clearer
this August, when the city will award an as-yet undetermined
number of 20-year contracts-each expected to exceed $100
million a year-for the job. Among the 13 companies applying
are some of the biggest names in the trash-hauling world:
Browning-Ferris Industries, Waste Management and USA
Waste.
Even if the companies are able to muscle past local opposi-
tion, they still must surmount huge logistical problems presented
by the city's outdated rail, waterway and road infrastructure,
which will be pressed into service to bear the Fresh Kills burden.
Four years before the new system's slated starting date, the
administration is relying on the multinational waste management
companies to devise the solutions.
"It's a very ad hoc process," says Eric Goldstein, an attor-
ney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The adminis-
tration knows where it wants to end up, but it doesn't quite know
how to get there."
Or whether they'll get there at all. In fact, many are begin-
ning to question whether the city truly intends to shut down Fresh
Kills by 2002, if ever.
"I'm skeptical of whether they will close Fresh Kills at all,"
says Barbara Warren, director of the New York Toxics Project
and a Staten Island resident who has battled to get the big dump
closed.
T
o understand the city's current garbage crisis, it is
important to know its origins. For years, the city has
recognized that Fresh Kills is rapidly ftlling up and
needs to be replaced. In 1992, the Dinkins administration, led by
Deputy Mayor Norman Steisel-whom the Village Voice dubbed
''The Garbage Broker"-concocted a scheme to bum the landfill 's
waste in eight incinerators, including a massive one in the
Brooklyn Navy Yard.
The issue united diverse constituencies that had been divid-
ed by race, income and mutual distrust: Latinos and the Hasidim
in Williamsburg, Polish immigrants, Irish and Italians in
Greenpoint, African Americans and West Indians in Central
Brooklyn. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, whose Grand Street
co-op was located a mere 500 yards from the Navy Yard site
across the East River, also became a fervent opponent. "It would
be hard to find a more detested and less popular proposal in New
York City over the last 20 years than the Brooklyn Navy Yard
incinerator," says Goldstein.
The opponents of the plan weren' t merely mUlticultural,
they were methodical. After an initial defeat, they sold the City
Council on passing a law forcing the city to create a sweeping,
costly and time-consuming environmental impact statement. The
EIS strategy had two objectives: to delay the project beyond the
political careers of its sponsors and to raise the costs to an unten-
able level. On both scores they succeeded.
The effort was spearheaded by a coalition of environmen-
talists and activists, held together by the New York Public
Interest Research Group. "We slowly squeezed the life out of the
project," says former NYPIRG organizer Martin Brennan, dub-
bing it the "anaconda strategy."
First, they intervened in the permitting process, challenging
technical aspects of the incinerator's operations. Another lawsuit
succeeded in having the incinerator's ash classified as toxic
waste, raising the cost of landftlling the by-products. The price
tag went up. More and more politicians turned against it, and the
municipal incineration strategy was killed for good in 1996 when
state lawmakers passed a bill explicitly prohibiting it.
B
rooklyn's victory, it turned out, was Staten Island's
warning call. Fresh Kills, named after the creek that cuts
into the borough's Jerseyside shore, opened in 1948, first
as a temporary waste station, later as a permanent science-fiction
monstrosity that rose to 500 feet in height. In the 199Os, the 2,100
acre landfill-never properly designed or permitted-has been
declared a major health hazard in several environmental studies.
As of 1993, Staten Islanders had not only assembled an
army of anti-dump activists, they had created a full-scale politi-
cal movement, culminating in an as-yet unrealized push for
secession from the city-a move fueled, in part, by rage over
Fresh Kills.
Indeed, many of the anti-incinerator activists also played a
behind-the-scenes role in the Fresh Kills closure. Larry Shapiro,
an attorney with NYPIRG, worked with local elected officials in
Staten Island on the issue, ensuring that any legislation to close
Fresh Kills would also include a provision banning incineration.
For obvious reasons, Republican politicians have seized on
the Fresh Kills issue. Staten Island is the city's most conservative
borough and home to the city's sole GOP dynasty, led by
Borough President Guy Molinari. Giuliani probably would not
have been elected mayor in 1993 were it not for the strong voter
turnout in Staten Island, and Governor Pataki 's strongest down-
state electoral support came from the borough. So from the
beginning of their terrns, Giuliani and Pataki have both stumped
against the dump.
In May 1996, Giuliani, Pataki and Guy Molinari broke out
CITY LIMITS
the champagne bottles before the cameras, announcing that Fresh
Kills would be phased out and permanently closed by 2002. They
didn't say how they intended to do it.
T
he decision to shut down Fresh Kills was a shocker to
waste watchers citywide. There was no advance plan-
ning or any type of study undertaken beforehand. In
appearances before the City Council in 1995 and 1996,
Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty had never even hinted
that a closure of Fresh Kills was on the horizon. Nor did the mat-
ter come up three months before the announcement when the
administration completed its Solid Waste Management Plan, a
document most noteworthy for its recycling timetables.
Over the next few months, a strategy began to take shape.
Giuliani adopted a three-phase plan: First he would convene a
public task force to discuss alternatives; then he would incorpo-
rate their general suggestions into a set of options. Last, and most
important, he planned to send out a fill-in-the-blanks request for
contract proposals, allowing big garbage companies to respond
with highly detailed blueprints for the entire post-Fresh Kills sys-
tem. In effect, he had privatized garbage planning.
The Fresh Kills Task Force, which included agency offi-
cials, Molinari and his then-Congresswoman daughter Susan, as
well as two environmentalists (Barbara Warren and James Tripp
of the Environmental Defense Fund were added after protests)
released its report last year. In it, the panel recommended that
each borough produce its own waste management strategy.
When the boroughs each presented a plan to the city in the
spring of 1997, they criticized the city's reliance on marine
exporting and the administration's backroom planning tactics.
The counterproposals were a hodgepodge of solutions relating to
stepped-up recycling efforts, reductions in the waste stream,
such as limits on junk mail, and a call to cut the use of existing
waste transfer stations.
The Giuliani administration, however, would have none of
it. It seems like the mayor had his own ideas from the start--cre-
ating a massive new waste export system that would ship most of
the trash by sea, and at least one-third by land in trains and
trucks. ''The administration heard what we had to say and
ignored most of it," Warren says.
T
he key document of the city's new policy is the request
for proposals sent out to garbage companies-and it
painted a very clear picture about what kind of system
the administration favored. In a half-inch-thick document
released last June, the city explicitly solicits only those proposals
for shipping garbage out of the city via barge.
Although city officials refuse to divulge details about the 13
proposals they have gotten back, City Limits has reviewed some
of them, and they confirm that neighborhood-based waste trans-
fer stations will be at the core of the new garbage infrastructure.
For the most part they target Brooklyn and the Bronx. Late last
year, an environmental aide to Brooklyn Borough President
Howard Golden told the weekly Brooklyn Paper that the mayor's
office will really only consider sites in Brooklyn and the Bronx.
Plans for Staten Island transfer stations, the staffer complained,
were nowhere in any of the plans he had perused.
Recognizing the need to start local lobbying efforts, one
company has been very open about its intentions. American
Marine Rail (AMR), a New Jersey-based company, recently held
a public hearing in the South Bronx to explain its plans for a mas-
sive transfer station in the Hunts Point section. "Sooner or later,
everybody's going to have to talk to people about this," says
Robert Jones, a principal with AMR. "We think it's better to do it
now rather than later."
According to company officials, AMR wants to develop a
five-acre marine transfer station near the Oak Point Freight Yard,
just a few blocks away from the city's poorest residential neigh-
borhoods. Refuse would be transported to the site via barge, put
into containers and moved to rail cars, which would carry it out
to an unspecified landfill. The facility could handle as much as
5,000 tons of trash a day, or nearly 40 percent of the city's entire
residential output, according to AMR.
The plan would rob local residents of the right to develop
What Has 18 Wheels and Plles'l
B
V8D Iftba GlalIaDI admlnlstra
ti_ Is able to pub tbroa&Ia Its
plaia to Bldp wasta oat oftba
city III ........., a slpl"callt parceDt.
.... of the cltJ'1 prbap wtIl still
bava to be moved _ IaDd.
BverJbody I88I1II to aarea that
IDO'fbII waste by track Is a bad Idea.
ID a city aIreadJ' cbokad with track
tralllo-aDd IaclDlIedaraI m... AIr
Act B&DCtIoaB-the prospect of more
I8-wbeaIarB ..... bllDldowa IIaw
YorIE'I streets Islaardly appetIzIDI.
TIle altal'llatln' BalLIIotb city
SaaItattoa CommhuMlMno MIl
DoIaartJ' aDd varIoaB CIty CJoaDcII
ID8IIIbaI'II bava toDtad rail &I the way
to IDOft waste oat of ... 1'ortE.
......... ljaBt ODe problem: It proba-
blywoa'twan..
""ft6ra reaII7 Is .. acoaoadcal way
to tab .... fraIIl tile city to
ftoItDIa by raII," up attanar &lid
railroad uaIyBt MIl ....... WIIaa
It __ to rail freI&M, ... York CIty
JANUARY 1998
Is crippled aDd Isolated, the .... ult of
the stata"1 DOtorIoaB IDabIIIty to
devise a coordbaatad rail system.
........ Is a ppIq dIBcoIuutct batwaaD
... York CIty aDd the rest of the
IIatIaa then"s, to the city ...........
1118Dt"11aII1Ire to 1IPII"&da Its rail to
baIIdJa IIIOdara ...... In .... And the
ODe Btr8tcb oftracIE that can bandla
IDOdarn rail traIIIo-tba Oak PoInt
LInk alODI the ....... 1lInr--I"ans
IID&CIE Into a rail yard that wtIl be
laaBad oat to a privata dave10par 1IIIt:II
2OI1--prbnar11y forlnd1lltrla1111181
otber tban raIL
""""1 little IIbIIbood of any
.... baInI balded by fnI&Iat III
aItber 8rooIdp 11'....., th.n"l to
atraordInar7 tecIudcaI ...............
not to...uoa poiltlcai oppGIIItIaa.
VDder pr ...... fraIIl ...... 1IaroaIIa
PrasIIIIat ClaIre .... n. the prI.
fttaIy ran INIIIIt GpII'&tDa that was
the..., ...... :aaa ""1 tracIEB

moratorhun _ BblppIng wasta.
But 8V8D Iftba prbap .... baalad
to the Broaz III barps aDd tracU for
transfer to rail, for rail freI&ht to
CI'OII the II1IdIIon IUnr to the conti
naata1 V.8.1t m1llt tnmtI13"1 ndlaB
north to SaIIdI'IE-an aDdaround
nIckn ..... the "SaIIdrk 1I1IrdIa."
ID otIIer wards, the waste transfer
system Is .. acb ..... 1III8Iy to depend
_ tracIm III the Iatve tban on roIUnI
stock, barrInI any .... overbaalB of
the cltJ'l raIIlnfrutractare.
""I"ba railroads are 8IIII8DtIa1ly oat
of the ............... n8l11ol' IOID8
tIIDe," IIcIIa8b ..,.. ""I"ba tI"IIcIaI
bava It, aDd that"IIt-"
And that coald be bad .....
Boward CIokIan'1 o8lca .... m.tes the
propoud new marina aDd landbaIed
tranBfeI' BtMIaaB would rasalt III
182.000 addltIaaal tracIl trIpI _
llaw1'ark Cltr'1 0I8I'I0adad bI&b.
ways, ......... and tannaIB 89'81'7
,.........a
-
Hunts Point in the
South Bronx,
home to the
nation's largest
wholesale food
market, may get
one of the city's
biggest neighbor-
hood garbage
dumps.
-
their own turf the way they see fit. The Point, a community
development corporation, has been trying to transform 11 acres
of nearby waterfront property into a beach club called La
Playita. "We have a grand plan to use that space," says Paul
Libson, the organization's associate director. "There's not a hell
of a lot of waterfront property available in New York City, much
less the Bronx, and we have no public access right now."
B
ut designs for the Bronx are less ambitious than what
private-sector garbage entrepreneurs have in mind for
Brooklyn, where the entire waterfront from the
Queens border to Bay Ridge is an underdeveloped dumping
ground-in-waiting. Indeed, no less than five sites have been tar-
geted for marine transfer stations by pri vate companies, accord-
ing to Borough President Golden.
Currently, the city uses eight marine transfer stations, but
they are small, designed for barges to travel short distances on the
relatively placid waterways of the New York Harbor and the East
River. If the city's going to export the waste outside its borders,
it will need a larger fleet for more treacherous waters. In other
words, there must be a large marine transfer station with the size
and capacity to unload barges corning from within the city and
re-Ioad the waste onto mega-barges.
Sources say USA Waste has proposed turning Red Hook's
Erie Basin into this mother of all transfer stations. The site is the
former New York Shipyard, surrounded by a 2,500-foot break-
water, at the foot of Columbia Street. The surrounding area has
witnessed a minor renaissance in recent years; piers have been
refurbished and leased to private businesses. Erie Basin is locat-
ed only a few blocks from Red Hook Houses, a public housing
project with some 8,000 residents.
Unlike the existing marine stations, Erie Basin is deep
enough for ocean-going barges and has the infrastructure suited
for a large-scale operation. Two other sites in Red Hook are also
being eyed, according to local press accounts.
Browning-Ferris Industries-a company that earned
Giuliani plaudits for helping bust the mob-controlled commercial
carting business-is also considering space along the Brooklyn
waterfront, at the 65th Street Rail Yard in Bay Ridge. The advan-
tages of that site are numerous: acres of open space, access to
railroad lines plenty of potential barge berths.
But this area, too, is near a major housing development-
Bay Ridge Towers, a politically active co-op that defeated a heli-
port planned for the area. Bay Ridge is also part of the Staten
Island congressional district that just elected Vito Fossella, who
played a pivotal role in closing Fresh Kills.
I
t's not as if there's a shortage of other ideas for developing
the water's edge. In fact, most of the communities on the
short list for these new marine operations are either in the
process of wrapping up or have already completed comprehensive
plans for improving their waterfronts. Most of them have advo-
cated "mixed-use"-a combination of open space, recreation,
manufacturing and housing.
In Sunset Park, where at least one massive marine transfer
station has been proposed, planners and residents met for a week-
end-long conference in early December to defiantly discuss var-
ious non-putrescent proposals.
There was talk of boosting manufacturing through new rail
lines and a hub port, creating parkland, establishing a high
school. There was no support for a marine transfer station. "We
want public access, parks and recreation," says Gene Moore, dis-
trict manager of the local community board. "No one wants a
waste transfer station."
The heavily residential neighborhood already bears the mark
of one of the worst urban planning atrocities of the 20th century. In
the 194Os, planning city powerhouse Robert Moses bulled through
the Gowanus Expressway, which split the neighborhood in half and
effectively killed the Third Avenue corridor, the main commercial
street for the neighborhood's then-thriving Scandinavian population.
The garbage plan, residents say, will have as damaging an
impact on the area's current Puerto Rican, Dominican and
Mexican populations.
"People don't think this community is saturated-it is,"
says Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of the United
Puerto Rican Organization of Sunset Park. "We have the
Gowanus reconstruction, which is [re-routing] 10,000 cars a day
through Sunset Park. There's already a bus depot here."
Both the Sunset Park and Bay Ridge proposals would also
obliterate ambitious plans to develop a major shipping port from
Atlantic Avenue to 65th Street, anchored by a new rail tunnel
connecting New Jersey and Brooklyn. "I don't know how real
these [garbage dump] ideas are, but they're idiotic," fumes
Jerrold Nadler, the Manhattan and Brooklyn congressman who
has spearheaded the port plan. "Sixty-fifth Street [in Bay Ridge]
is the one rail yard we have that can be used for ship-to-rail pur-
poses. We can't use it as a marine transfer station."
W-
hatever the opposition, it doesn't seem likely the
Giuliani administration will back down-which
means 1998 will mark the beginning of the
Second Garbage War. Expect the same groups that led the fight
against the Brooklyn Navy Yard incinerator to regroup for
CITY LIMITS
What has Pour Walls and Plles'l
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another lengthy insurrection.
There have already been skirmishes. Under pressure from
NYPIRG and a newly established umbrella group organized to
fight the plan-the Organization of Waterfront Neighborhoods-
the City Council introduced a new bill that called for the city to
push harder on non-export waste management alternatives.
Brooklyn Councilman Ken Fisher, a moderate Democrat
who has a good relationship with Council Speaker, Peter Valone,
has proposed a much tougher counter-measure: a one-year mora-
torium on the expansion and construction of waste transfer sta-
tions. The bill is adamantly opposed by the Giuliani administra-
tion, as well as by Guy Molinari, who says it would delay the clo-
sure of Fresh Kills.
But Giuliani will have a harder time fighting a recent state
Appellate Division decision. In December, the court said the city
could no longer ignore a seven-year-old law mandating the strict
regulation of waste transfer facilities. The statute also places lim-
its on siting new dumps in overburdened neighborhoods. The rul-
ing could have wider implications and, at press time, advocates
were studying it with an eye on future actions.
The city's reliance on the out-of-state export strategy-at the
expense of at-home measures like increased recycling and waste
stream reductions-is also likely to evoke opposition from neigh-
boring states. "If New York City is perceived to be relying totally
on garbage exporting, that's not going to sit well with Congress,"
NYPIRG's Shapiro says. "West of the Hudson, there are a lot of
people who don't like New York. Doing things that play into that
bias is a political error that will come back to haunt us."
Virginia, home base of several garbage multinationals, is
longing to reap Gotham's garbage harvest in 2002, but others
aren't so eager. Last year, Governor Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania
made it clear he didn't want to see any city trash inside his bor-
ders when he sent an angry letter to fellow Republican George
Pataki urging a garbage shipping moratorium.
JANUARY 1998
O
utside forces aside, the fight will be won or lost in the
neighborhoods. "I cannot imagine how the city can
close Fresh Kills without turning it into a huge issue on
local levels," says Arthur Kell, NYPIRG's toxic projects coordi-
nator. "It would be miraculous if these changes happened easily."
In Bay Ridge and Sunset Park, where residents recently
blocked a plan for a local mega-mall, public officials and com-
munity leaders are considering a class action suit against the
city and an appeal to the federal government based on the envi-
ronmental impact of the proposed stations. Steve Carbo, an
aide to South Bronx Congressman Jose Serrano, says a lawsuit
on civil rights grounds is a distinct possibility if communities
of color are disproportionately burdened with new garbage
facilities.
Many of the same tactics used to kill the Brooklyn Navy
Yard incinerator-remember the anaconda strategy--could very
well be used again. Any company the city selects for barge-haul-
ing will have to endure the same cumbersome permitting process
and the same environmental review that doomed Waste
Management, Inc. when it posited its incineration plan.
But can the locals win two in a row? Environmental poli-
tics, particularly on the grassroots level, is notoriously fratricidal,
vulnerable to all sorts of squabbling. And the administration
could attempt to buy off neighborhood support-in the form of
new parks, school improvements and other amenities-in order
to cleave the coalition.
Even if the city can fInd enough takers, the fees for using
out-of-state landfills could exceed $300 million per year, accord-
ing to Comptroller Alan Hevesi.
But the greatest peril for neighborhoods is the city's desper-
ation. Even if the Fresh Kills shut-down is pushed back, the mega-
dump will have to be closed sometime in the not-too-distant
future.
And the garbage has to go somewhere .
-
Sandtown resident
Beatrice Perry
watches her neigh-
borhood change
from her livring
room window.
-
Left Behind
in Sandtown
THE ENTERPRISE FOUNDATION LED
A $60 MILLION EFFORT TO REPAIR A
BROKEN BALTIMORE NEIGHBORHOOD.
ALL IT FIXED WAS THE BUILDINGS.
By Barry Yeoman
here wasn't an empty parking space for
blocks around Gilmor Elementary School
the night Mayor Kurt Schmoke visited
Baltimore's Sandtown-Winchester neighbor-
hood last June. Braving the summer rain,
400 people packed the auditorium to meet
the man who was trying to tum their com-
munity into a national model of urban
rebirth.
SchInoke had every reason to believe this
would be his fmest hour. After decades of
neglect by white mayors-whose economic strategies revolved
around reviving the city's crumbling Inner Harbor and cultivating
tourism-Sandtown had captured Schmoke's attention even
before his 1987 election. Working closely with the nonprofit
Enterprise Foundation, Schmoke helped funnel more than $60
million into Sandtown, a 72-square-block cluster of rowhouses
and rubble-strewn lots that for decades had been one of the
nation's poorest communities.
Thanks to the massive reinvestment in Sandtown, crime and
infant mortality rates had declined. Chronically unemployed peo-
ple had found work. Hundreds of boarded-up row houses had
been rehabbed or replaced. And politicians, including President
Clinton, had come by to ooh and ahh. But the residents who filled
the Gilmor auditorium that evening didn' t come to praise the
mayor. Instead, after years of silence, scores of men and women
were there to vent.
'They were very disappointed at the way the transformation
of Sandtown was going," remembers one resident who attended
the meeting. 'They didn' t feel like a whole lot of progress had
been made, and they didn' t feel like the residents had been includ-
ed in the decision-making. It really caught people like the mayor
off guard. People were angry and frustrated."
Residents mentioned specific problems, like the ever-pre-
sent drug dealers and inadequate city trash removal, but the
underlying complaint went deeper: Many people who live in
Sandtown didn' t feel that they had any more power over the
direction of their community than they had when the renewal
efforts fust began.
Seven years into one of the nation's most widely touted
experiments in rebuilding an inner-city neighborhood, the results
are full of such contradictions. Some blocks sport beautiful new
houses; others are lined with burnt-out shells. Some residents
--
"'THE MONEY THAT'S COMING INTO SANDTOWN IS COMING AT THE EXPENSE
Dilapidated row
houses still haunt
Lorman Street
(left ) while new
construction
dominates Leslie
Street.
have left the drug culture, thanks to new social programs; others
don' t even know the programs exist. Because the majority of the
investment has gone into bricks and mortar rather than into fos-
tering a more activist community and more supportive neighbor-
hood institutions, the revitalization of Sandtown has shored up the
district' s facade-but left the interior structure still in serious need
of repair.
"We hit the ground and started running-and left the neigh-
borhood behind," says Norman Yancey, a Sandtown resident who
works for Community Building in Partnership, the organization
that coordinates the city's effort to transform Sandtown.
T
he dream that spawned Sandtown's transformation was
summed up a decade ago in a fiery prayer delivered at
the Baltimore Palladium. The occasion was the 1987
convention of Baltimoreans United in Leadership
Development (Blill.D), a church-based coalition affili-
ated with the Industrial Areas Foundation, a nationwide umbrella
organization of community action groups founded by organizing
guru Saul Alinsky in 1940. At the convention's pulpit, the
Reverend Grady Yeargin brought 2,000 delegates to their feet with
a stirring promise.
"One day it will be said that in the city of Baltimore in the
last quarter of the 20th century, strange and unusual things began
to happen," preached Yeargin, a Baptist minister. ''The upper crust
began to meet with the middle crust and with those who have no
crust at all. It was a peculiar people: a strange and unusual coali-
tion that negotiated and fought and worked together."
Those weren't just lofty words. Earlier that year, Blill.D had
rallied the city's two mayoral candidates behind an intensive push
to increase homeownership. The "Sandtown-Winchester 600"-
abandoned brick and formstone rowhouses boarded up with ply-
wood-were spread like a cancer throughout the neighborhood.
On some blocks, the few houses that weren't vacant displayed
their inhabitants' stubborn pride with fresh paint and window
boxes full of silk flowers.
Thi s West Baltimore community of 10,000 people-all but
a few dozen of them African American-wasn' t always back on
its heels. Early in the century it was a working-class black resi -
dential neighborhood, where Cab Calloway grew up and
Thurgood Marshall went to high school. But by tlie 1980s, half
of Sandtown's households had incomes of less than $11,000 a
year, and nearly half the working-age population was unem-
ployed or working only on occasional jobs. The infant mortality
rate was four times the national average. And drug deals and vio-
lent crime left residents wary of walking certain streets, even in
broad daylight.
For its inspiration, BUILD looked to its sister IAF orga-
nization, East Brooklyn Congregations in New York, which
had begun building more than 3,000 new single-family homes
in mostly abandoned blocks of land in Brownsville and East
New York through its Nehemiah project. Like their Brooklyn
counterparts, Blill.D's leaders believed that creating a critical
mass of new owner-occupied houses was key to community
revitalization.
Although both of Baltimore' s mayoral candidates visited
East Brooklyn, Schmoke was the one who fully embraced the
Nehemiah strategy. In the two years after he became
Baltimore's first black mayor, he and Blill.D raised almost $20
million in federal , city, state and church funds for the Nehemiah
project. They chose the site of an abandoned commercial bak-
ery in Sandtown for several hundred new rowhouses, while
another, smaller Nehemiah project was slated for an adjacent
neighborhood.
Once it had secured the land, Blill.D and the city needed
one more partner: a nonprofit developer. They turned to James
Rouse. A pioneer of the indoor shopping mall and the neo-tradi-
tional suburb, Rouse is best known for creating Baltimore's
Harborplace and Boston's Faneui! Hall Market on those city's
once-dilapidated waterfronts. After making his fortune, Rouse
turned his attentions to urban poverty, and in 1982, he founded the
Enterprise Foundation to provide decent low-income housing in
cities across the nation.
''The main job now isn't the center of cities, but the desper-
ately poor neighborhoods," he told The Baltimore Sun in 1994,
two years before his death. "We want some simple answer, but
there isn't any." Sandtown-Winchester was to become the
Enterprise Foundation's showpiece: an effort to prove that the
poorest of neighborhoods could be turned around with skillful
development teams. For Rouse, it would be the culmination of his
life's work.
The collaboration officially started in 1990 with the Nehemiah
project. Two hundred and twenty-seven brick rowhouses, most of
them prefabricated, sold for $37,000 each. The dwellings were
heavily subsidized; each cost $83,000 to build. Still, says Baltimore
Housing Commissioner Daniel Henson III, "they provide an island
of stability in the center of Sandtown." To bolster this stability, an
adjacent site has been designated a federal Homeownership Zone,
and another 300 new units will be
built with public money.
Other parts of the neighbor-
hood have seen physical improve-
ments, too. Habitat for Humanity
turned an entire city block into
renovated rowhouses painted in
pastel lavenders and yellows. The
Sandtown Winchester Community
Development Corporation turned
another block into a showcase of
historically sensitive rehabilitation
and new construction, where
homes sport front porches and
knee-high picket fences. And sev-
eral hundred other houses and
apartments have been rehabilitat-
ed with government funds .
CITY LIMITS
OF OTHER NEIGHBORHOODS"
O
n a gray November afternoon on Leslie Street, a dozen
future homeowners clean up mud, sweep half-built hall-
ways and load lumber into what will be their living rooms.
From a boom box a gospel group sings of renewal and sal-
vation. The music is fitting: Where once stood some of the
city's most dilapidated housing, Habitat for Humanity is putting up
27 homes that will belong to neighborhood residents-yet another
affordable housing program underway in Sandtown.
"When I was in school, I used to be teased a lot, because no
one believed anyone lived on the block," says 30-year-old Bubby
Crosby, who grew up on Leslie Street. Now Crosby oversees the
construction, and he'll be moving into one of the comer houses
this spring. He and his neighbors will pay no interest on their
$40,000, three-bedroom units-all told, the monthly payments
will average about $250. "This is just one step in the transforma-
tion of our community," says Crosby, breaking into a dreamy
smile. "When people see this block, they're going to stop and take
a doubletake. They'll probably drive through to see if it's rea!."
But some wonder how real the transformation is. The
Sandtown-Winchester 600, which Mayor Schmoke once
promised to eliminate by 1994, have not yet disappeared. Some
houses have been rehabbed or replaced, but many others have
gone vacant. "We created some moving around, as opposed to
increases in the population," says Maryland Housing and
Community Development Secretary Patricia Payne, whose
agency has contributed $28 million to the effort.
Critics say it's because there's been very little big-picture
planning. Among the collaboration's partners-particularly the
city and the Enterprise Foundation-there was a sense of wanti-
ng to rebuild everything. They acquired vacant houses as they
became available, then renovated or replaced them. Nobody,
however, was looking at demographic trends to see if they could
fill 600 additional units of housing.
The Sandtown partners were essentially ignoring a phenom-
enon that plagues Baltimore and other cities, something planners
call "undercrowding." Simply stated, Baltimore was built for
almost a million people at its industrial peak, but now only 700,000
Ii ve inside the city limits. The population continues to shrink, leav-
ing upwards of 50,000 dwellings vacant at any given time.
"You can't build your way out of a housing surplus,"
explains Doug Rae, a Yale University management professor and
an expert on undercrowding. Yet many cities try to do just that,
increasing the housing stock by rehabbing abandoned buildings-
and hoping somehow an increasing population will fill the new
units. In places with hot real estate markets, developers are often
able to lure people into previously decimated neighborhoods; wit-
ness the South Bronx's recent resurgence. But even the most
vehement promoters of urban living concede this won't work in a
seriously undercrowded city like Baltimore. ''That is often like
pouring gasoline on a fire, because it competes with the remain-
ing units and causes them to go blank," Rae says.
Sandtown's partners now acknowledge the undercrowding
problem and say they are planning strategies for accommodating
lower densities in the neighborhood. But Rae says downsizing
Sandtown will be more complicated than the collaborators antici-
pate. "A community planning process would have to be at the very
center of this," he says. Residents would have to help develop a plan
where entire rows of 10 to 25 houses are tom down to be replaced
by parks and plazas while new development is concentrated in cer-
tain areas. A barter system would have to be developed so that resi-
dents could move easily from one part of the neighborhood to anoth-
er. And beyond that, there's a whole set of design issues, like how to
JANUARY 1998
stitch together all of Baltimore's reconceived neighborhoods.
In other parts of the city, this kind of analysis is well rec-
ognized. Baltimore's Citizens Planning and Housing
Association, a 56-year-old organization that tackles citywide
neighborhood issues, has been working with residents and
neighborhood organizations to solve common problems, focus-
ing on closing drug markets, training future community leaders
and brainstorming solutions to undercrowding. But Sandtown
hasn't been an active part of that effort, and some leaders from
other neighborhoods say Sandtown's lone cowboy approach has
already harmed their communities.
Across town, in the more integrated Waverly neighborhood
near Johns Hopkins University, Jackie MacMillan pulls her win-
ter coat tight against her chest as she walks down the 900 block of
Montpelier Street. Two of the rowhouses that dominate the block
are boarded up, a house across the street is gutted by fire and the
commercial building on the comer sits empty.
"With neighborhoods like this, the city seems to think, 'Well,
they' ll take care of it,'" says MacMillan, who co-chairs the Waverly
Housing Committee. The problem, she says, is that neighborhoods
like hers-not dilapidated but facing decline-need outside assis-
tance to keep from deteriorating further. And that money isn' t avail-
able, she says, because so much funding goes to Sandtown.
''There are neighborhoods like mine where there's been a real
surge in vacant houses in the last two, three years. If you can pick up
a vacant house, renovate it and sell it to a first-time homeowner, you
can stabilize that block," MacMillan says. "Some neighborhood
activists have been frustrated because the city has leveraged an
incredible amount of [federal community development] money for
Sandtown instead of disbursing it throughout the city. It's supposed
to be a model, but it's sucking up a huge amount of resources."
Others agree. "City neighborhoods are dying because of a
lack of government investment," says Ed Rutkowski , director of
the East Fayette Street Community Development Corporation,
which serves a working-class neighborhood on the east side of
town. "All the money that's coming into Sandtown is coming at
the expense of other neighborhoods."
Locals Robert
Torain and Jason
Randall (fore-
ground) are mem-
bers of the Urban
Youth Corps, one
of Sandtown s new
social service
programs.
...
Leroy Miller, who
lives on Lorman
Street, is one of
many Sandtown
residents who
hope the improve-
ments take hold
permanently.
A
t the start of Sandtown's transformation, community-
building meant exactly that----construction and renova-
tion. "Housing is what Mr. Rouse did as a trade," says
Joan Thompson, director of neighborhood transforma-
tion for the Enterprise Foundation. "Only after he put
up houses did people come up and say to him, 'This house is very
nice, but I have no job. '"
It took several years for the partners to develop a compre-
hensive program, but in 1993 Community Building in Partnership
(CBP), the nonprofit organization that coordinates Sandtown's
revitalization, was born. CBP now runs programs dealing with
youth leadership, parenting, job readiness, community gardening,
health care and recreation. In addition, through a compact with the
city school system, it's working on curriculum improvements,
computer technology, adult education and parental involvement in
three neighborhood schools.
"We' re looking at all the dysfunctional systems and trying to
fix them at about the same time," Thompson says. All told, $8 mil-
lion has been spent on these "soft" programs, she says, compared
to $53 million for housing development and rehabilitation.
CBP operates out of a former school building set up on a hill
overlooking one of Sandtown's most rundown blocks. On a
Friday morning, the headquarters buzzes with activity. In a third-
floor classroom, Craig Jernigan leads a group of teenagers and
young adults through a rambunctious role-playing exercise.
Members of the Sandtown-Winchester Urban Youth Corps are
pretending to be drug dealers, cops and FBI agents. Jernigan, a
lanky, bearded 24-year-old, is taking his charges down a simula-
tion of the drug trade's dead-end road.
Shantaya Huntley, a slender 20-year-old with hair pulled into
a homemade tuck, plays the part of the Queen Mama, the leader
of the local drug ring. The "police" bust Queen Mama and bring
her to trial, where she faces 50 years in prison. Jernigan offers her
a way out: "You're about to be sentenced in 15 minutes. But if you
can give us one name, you can walk free." Huntley is stubborn-
and loyal to her friends. "I'm not saying," she says.
"Check it out," Jernigan tells the group. "She got 50."
This drama is all too familiar to Huntley. Three years ago,
she says, "I went into selling drugs and just doing the complete
opposite of what my mother told me to do. All my friends were
doing it. I saw the fast money and how fast they got it." Huntley
wasn' t so lucky: She was shot once and locked up twice. Now, in
the Youth Corps, she works for the Baltimore Public Works
Department, cleaning alleys and doing clerical work. Fridays are
devoted to group-building activities like the drug drama. She says
it's a relief to be off the streets.
When the drama winds down, Jernigan gives his rap about
resisting those who complacently accept their lives in the drug
trade. The room falls silent. "Many of you are fighting friends,
families, loved ones," he says. "Being amongst people who are
complacent is a direct threat on your life. It's like the Grim Reaper
sneaking up in the night, taking you out. You don't see him com-
ing. But in the middle of the night, you wake up dead."
According to CBP, programs like Urban Youth Corps have
paid off. In a June 1997 progress report, the nonprofit noted that
33 Youth Corps graduates now work full time, with six in college.
More than 300 people have been placed in jobs through a training
program called Sandtown Works. Ninety-nine percent of the chil-
dren in three local elementary schools have been immunized, part-
ly through the efforts of the Vision for Health Consortium. And in
December 1996, the renovated Avenue Market opened at the edge
of Sandtown with more than 20 stalls selling clothing, fresh
seafood and vegetables, and Caribbean and Chinese food.
But despite these successes, one thing remains missing in
Sandtown: a sense of community ownership.
W
hile CBP's board includes a number of people from
the community, most neighborhood residents have
been kept from any leadership role since the very
beginning of the community renewal effort. And
this has led to a schism between the original part-
ners who put together the Sandtown project nearly a decade ago.
Early on, BUILD's leaders argued that real transformation
couldn't happen unless residents were taught political organizing
and leadership skills-a process they believed would empower
the neighborhood faster than new social programs. For example,
says BUILD's lead organizer, Kathleen O'Toole, new homeown-
ers in the neighborhood need the tools to fight politically for eco-
nomic security if they want to hold on to their dwellings.
"The instability of low-wage and temp work was frankly
going to threaten any Nehemiah work we' ve been dOing," she
says.
But the Enterprise Foundation and the Schmoke administra-
tion had deeper pockets than BUILD, and their bricks-and-mortar-
and-social-service vision won out. BUILD ducked out of its role
as a Sandtown partner and refocused on organizing around eco-
nomic issues, including its successful citywide campaign to
demand a living wage for employees of city contractors. In
Sandtown, BUILD has remained involved in the Homeownership
Zone, but the organization's name no longer appears on the joint
project's literature. O' Toole is diplomatic about the change, say-
ing that since 1992 her group has taken "a different approach to
the transformation."
This left Enterprise as the leading private partner, and
observers say the foundation let grassroots organizing fall by the
wayside. The absence was noticed by many. ''They' re developing
relationships with banks, not with people," charged an executive
from another foundation in Harold McDougall's 1993 book
"Black Baltimore: A New Theory of Community."
"They should be creating capacity in communities," the
executive continued. "Instead, they' re developing capacity in
CITY LIMITS
themselves, and the communities that they go into have to keep
asking them to come back to do the work. The community people
that they trot out look like window dressing."
Even government officials who usually handle development
issues worry about this. "Most of the gains made in public hous-
ing have happened because tenant leaders have sat down with
their neighbors and mobilized them to buy into the process of
revitalizing where they live," says Yvonne Johnson, a housing
official with the state of Maryland. "[Sandtown needs] leaders
who can move effectively throughout those 72 blocks and make
those communities' concerns be heard by the partners. The
absence of that type of grassroots coalition-building can delay the
process, and I think that's what's happening."
But political leaders wanted immediate results, and leader-
ship development just isn't as sexy. "Believe me, it's not glam-
orous," says Housing Secretary Payne. "No mayor is going to
wait around for that."
According to Emmanuel Price, Community Building in
Partnership's interim CEO, the people of Sandtown would have
also grown impatient. "It's no question that the community could
have stood for more leadership development," he says. But, he
argues, housing had to come frrst. "I question whether the com-
munity could have waited. They were hungry, and they wanted to
see something."
N
Ow, seven years into the transformation, CBP is scram-
bling to make up for lost time. "We've begun the
process of doing the grassroots outreach again," says
Price. Thirty AmeriCorps volunteers are organizing res-
idents door-to-door around public safety issues. More
importantly, CBP plans to bring in facilitators to train people who
have been identified as community leaders-a process Price
hopes will be underway by February.
The architects of Sandtown's renewal hope strengthening
CBP's comprehensive community-building efforts, acknowledg-
ing the need to deal with undercrowding, and comrniting to grass-
roots empowerment will correct mistakes made in the past. "If this
is used as the laboratory, then there are lessons to be learned here,"
says the Enterprise Foundation's Joan Thompson. "Some of the
growing pains that we have, another neighborhood might not have
to go through."
Is Sandtown a model for the rest of the country? Some out-
siders think not. Poverty persists here, despite the millions of dol-
lars invested in development. And economic renewal has only
made a dent.
"How do they see restoring a conventional marketplace
there?" asks Joe McNeely, director of the Development Training
Institute, a Baltimore-based nonprofit that provides technical assis-
tance in the community development field. "Or do they see this as
a continually subsidized low-income neighborhood with people on
dependence programs?" He wonders what will happen when the
goverrunent and the Enterprise Foundation pull out.
McNeely says that by pouring unprecedented amounts of
money into the neighborhood, the partners have created a model that
will never be replicated. The real goal, he says, should be to create a
community that can sustain itself economically over the long haul.
But the leadership at CBP believes they've learned how to
do this-and they say they've gathered resources to try to deal
with the most important underlying issues of community building.
Their goal these days is to give Sandtown's residents the
resources to start their own businesses, build their own houses and
advocate for themselves at City Hall. "Our job," Price says, "is to
work ourselves out of a job."
Barry Yeoman is a senior staff writer at The Independent an
alternative weekly newspaper in Durham, North Carolina.
DIRECTOR, Technical Assistance & Training Center. Affordable Housing
Network NJ seeks highly experienced person to manage TA & Training
Center. Responsibilities include administration, program
planning/implementation, supervision of 4 staff, fundraising, provision
of TA & training to CDCs. Requirements: 10+ years experience in hous-
ing and community development, including direct experience in most of
the following: real estate development, organization development, prop-
erty management, community organizing, neighborhood planning; plus
managerial, financial management, computer skills, and excellent writ-
ing/communication skills. Excellent benefits. Minority candidates
encouraged to apply. Send resume to: Diane Sterner, Executive Director,
Affordable Housing Network, P.O. Box 1746, Trenton, NJ 08607.
COMMUNrTYlTENANT ORGANIZERS, Real Estate (2) Not-for-profit real
estate management and development company located in Brooklyn
seeks tenant advocator to set up and handle Tenant Association and
meetings. Serve as a liaison between tenants and management.
Educate tenants on housing issues and programs. Highly organized and
computer literate person. Bilingual a plus. Fax resume and salary
requirements: Dianne Polite, 718-485-4683.
PROPERTY MANAGER, Real Estate. Not-for-profit real estate management
and development company located in Brooklyn seeks experienced
Property Manager with minimum 4 years. Must have professional certi-
fication. Knowledge of Skyline helpful. Computer literate. Fax resume
and salary requirements: Dianne Polite, 718-485-4683.
CASEWORKER, Real Estate. Not-for-profit real estate development com-
pany located in Brooklyn seeks highly organized, computer literate per-
son to counsel tenants on various housing programs and other impor-
tant issues. Must have minimum 4 years experience with a degree in
social work. Bilingual a plus. Fax resume with salary requirements:
Dianne Polite, 718-485-4683.
SENIOR PROPERTY MANAGER, Real Estate. Not-for-profit real estate man-
agement and development company located in Brooklyn: Must have pro-
fessional certification. Knowledge of Skyline helpful. Minimum 4 years.
Fax resume and salary requirements: Dianne Polite, 718-485-4683.
RECEPTlONISTISECRETARY, Real Estate. Not-forprofit real estate manage-
ment and development company seeks energetic, outgoing, responsible
person to handle hectic office. Computer literate. Must be able to han-
dle busy office. Minimum 2 years. Bilingual a plus. Fax resume and
salary requirements: Dianne Polite, 718-485-4683.
JANUARY 1998
OFFICE MANAGER, Real Estate. Not-for-profit real estate management and
development company located in Brooklyn seeks highly motivated and
energetic person. Take-charge person. Minimum 5 years experience.
Computer literate a must. Some overtime required. Fax resume and
salary requirements: Dianne Polite, 718-485-4683.
COMMUNrTY COORDINATOR, Anti-crime organizing project in North
Brooklyn. Build problem-solving, community/police partnerships. Project
coordination, training, outreaCh, database maintenance. B.A. +3 years
experience in community policing or anti-crime and/or drug organizing.
Night meetings and irregular hours. Excellent writing/public speaking
skills. Familiarity with North Brooklyn neighborhoods, computer mapping
and databases, grassroots volunteer groups, bilingual all a plus. $35K.
Resume, 3 references, writing sample to: NACC, CCNYC, 305 7th Ave.,
15th R., NYC 10001. Fax: 212-989-0983.
more jobs ads on page 37
TIIID II I TIIIIPIIT SIIIIS: eLIIIII. IUD'S 10USI
First, the project is deeply dependent on its
Section 8 housing subsidy contract, which is set
to expire next year. After that, as is HUD's new
policy, Washington will only extend the contract
on a year-by-year basis, leaving tenants to deal
with credit problems that beset buildings that
have no long-term fmancial security.
11,a's Indgame
Second, the city has thus far refused to for-
give the more than $450,000 in property taxes
William & Georgia failed to pay during its
tenure. The tenants, arguing they should not be
responsible for this debt-and that they should
be eligible for a long-term tax abatement-
haven't paid taxes since. Today, the Elva
McZeal Tenant Association Housing
Development Fund Corporation (HDFC) owes
the city more than $1 million. And the tenants
don't know what will happen if the city ever
tries to collect this money.
Tbeir BrooklYD laDdlord left tbem liviDg iD
squalor for years, despite millioDs iD federal
subsidies. But today, tbe teDaDts bave WOD
control of BlvallcZeal ApartmeDts-aDd
tbeir Dew adversary is tbe goverDmeDt itself.
Resident leaders are worried that they could
eventually lose the project to its financial trou-
bles. "It would be devastating to the tenants," says
Dorothy Jones, the association's current president. 'Think of it,
after all the work that people did."
-
tories with happy endings are a rarity at the
Department of Housing and Urban
Development these days. Struggling with recent
budget and staff cuts and the remains of eight
years of Reagan-era corruption, the federal
housing agency isn't exactly brimming with
good news. But there's one project HUD's peo-
ple are eager to talk about: the Elva McZeal
Apartments in East New York.
Two years ago, the 143 families of this squat, two-building
development managed to wrest ownership of their homes from the
William & Georgia Corporation, a partnership of local investors
headed up by the father-and-son team of Milton and Howard J.
Kestenberg. For more than a decade, the company collected $1
million a year in rent and HUD subsidies, but provided desperate-
ly inadequate service and maintenance.
At their worst point, the buildings had neither lobby doors nor
locks, hallway lights or mailboxes. The boilers barely functioned,
the roofs needed replacement and leaky plumbing caused water
damage so severe that many kitchens and bathrooms were unfit
for use. There were exposed wires, families of rats and, in a few
apartments, walls that had begun cracking apart from the ceiling.
"It used to be so bad," recalls tenant Ella Cooper, "you didn't even
want to come home."
That was before tenants filed a lawsuit in federal court and
convinced a judge in April 1994 to place their building in
receivership. William & Georgia fought the move initially, but
less than a year later the partners agreed to settle, handing over the
deed of the property to the tenant leadership. Today, Elva McZeal
is proof of how much work can be done when managers properly
handle rental income. With tenants in charge, the building has got-
ten new roofs, boilers and windows. The lobbies are secure, the
halls are brightly lit and the apartments are well maintained.
Says Bill deBlasio, HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo's repre-
sentative for the region: ''The dramatic tum around of Elva
McZeal represents one of Secretary Cuomo's highest priorities-
getting rid of bad landlords and empowering tenants to take con-
trol of their own lives."
Unfortunately for the tenants of Elva McZeal, the end of this
HUD story has not yet been written. While the residents have
proven that federally subsidized housing can be well run, the
actions offederal and city housing officials have left the financial
future of the project in doubt.
r
or Jones, the work began five years ago when the
Kestenbergs' management company, Kenton Associates
Ltd., filed suit in Housing Court to evict her and her
three children from her mother's apartment. Jones had
been taking care of her mother, who was ill, and had been
hounding the management company about the building's heat
problems. At court that day, Jones met five of her neighbors, also
facing eviction, and they started talking about the buildings' poor
condition. "We said that something's got to be done about the
landlord," she recalls.
The tenants complained to a number of local politicians, one
of whom referred them to Brooklyn Legal Services Corporation
A. There they met Rick Wagner, the director of litigation.
Wagner investigated HUD's records and came up with the idea
of using the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt
Organizations (RICO) Act to take on William & Georgia in fed-
eral court. Wagner's racketeering charge was based on simple
evidence of alleged mail fraud: Month after month, in exchange
for Section 8 payments, William & Georgia had sent the gov-
ernment statements falsely certifying that the Elva McZeal
buildings were "decent, safe and sanitary."
The legal gambit forced the landlord and the courts to take
notice-and Wagner has since used RICO lawsuits to good effect
at Noble Drew Ali Houses in Brownsville and Medgar Evers and
Gates Avenue Houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant (see "Sweet
Victory," October 1997).
The lawsuit went even better than the tenants had hoped.
Residents produced a series of videotapes showing the extent of
the damage in their apartments. Wagner, arguing that tenants
shouldn't be forced to live in such squalid conditions, asked the
judge to take the property out of the Kestenbergs' hands. The
judge agreed and, at Wagner's request, appointed ARCO
Management to take over as receiver. William & Georgia's prin-
cipal investors eventually settled the lawsuit, signing over the
deed to the tenants in February 1995.
In the three year since, the tenants working with ARCO have
completed about $2 million worth of rehabilitation work, correct-
ing more than 500 building code violations which the Kestenbergs
had allowed to accumulate. The project has a 17-member tenant
board, which sponsors annual elections. Elva McZeal is now
CITY LIMITS
home to a number of new programs for the residents, including a
HUD-sponsored computer learning center and a homegrown
youth program, East New York Kids Power.
Because the buildings are still under ARCO's receivership, the
tenants do not yet have full control. While tenant leaders work
closely with ARCO on management issues, they have little over-
sight of the budget and concentrate mainly on improving the
buildings' atmosphere and social life. Slowly, however, residents
are taking more of an interest in running the project, says Cooper,
who is on the tenant board. "I think 85
to 90 percent [of the residents) want to
be involved. They just have theu
doubts," she says. "Now that they see
things getting done, they're gradually
corning to more meetings."
B
ut all of this will amount to
nothing if the tenants cannot
manage to put the property
on solid fmancial footing. To
accomplish this, they need to
take care of the tax debt left over from
the previous owner. More problemati-
cally, they also must find a way to
assure the banking community that the
project will be able to pay its bills over
the long haul. Only then will the resi-
dents be able to afford big-ticket capi-
tal improvements like apartment reha-
bilitation work.
For the moment, the tax bill is
Dorothy Jones' most pressing concern.
Working with Hillary Exter, another
lawyer in Wagner's office, Jones has
lobbied the city's Department of
Housing Preservation and
Development (HPD) to forgive the
back taxes and agree to future tax
abatements for the project. Exter main-
tains that Section 606 of the state's pri-
vate housing fmance law explicitly
allows this because Elva McZeal is an
HDFC a special class of low income
housing. She notes that the law was
used by HPD in 1985 to forgive the
taxes of an HDFC on East Houston
Street. HPD, however, has been unwill-
ing to give any HDFC this break in
recent years, despite broad support
among advocates of tenant ownership.
Officials there would not comment
except to say the matter is under
review.
All of which enrages Rick Wagner.
For years, HUD and city building
inspectors looked the other way as
William & Georgia allowed Elva
McZeal to deteriorate. Then the tenants
took the initiative and used rent money
that could have gone toward paying the
taxes to instead do desperately needed
reparr work. If either HUD or the city
had been forced to take ownership of
the property, he says, the buildings
JANUARV ISJ98
would have been eligible for millions in rehabilitation funds and
the taxes would have been automatically forgiven-all at far
greater cost to the taxpayers than the current arrangement.
The debt has left the property-and the tenants-sitting in
limbo. For the moment, the city cannot force the tenant-owners to
fork over the tax debt, because the City Council has forbidden
HPD from including HDFC properties in the city's sale of tax
liens to private corporations. Yet as long as it is on the books, no
one will loan the building a dime.
TenaJlt leader
Dorothy Jones
fears that back
taxes and HUD's
new Section 8 i
policies will jeop-
ardize the future . ~
~
of Elva McZeal.
-
T
he project's tax problems, however, may ultimately be
overshadowed by the uncertainty of its rental income.
Currently, the project's low-income tenants pay 30
percent of their income in rent. Under Elva McZeal's
project-based Section 8 contract, HUD supplements
this with subsidies bringing each apartment up to fair market rent.
there's an uncertainty about how the building economics are
going to function."
Whatever HUD does, tenant leaders at Elva McZeal accept
that it is now their responsibility to deal with the problem. "We' re
worried," Jones admits.
However, HUD recently announced it will no longer offer
long-terrn Section 8 contracts. Instead, building owners like
McZeal's tenant association will have to renew their contracts
annually, taking it as an article of faith that the government will
come through with the money. There is always the possibility-
albeit slim-that HUD will not renew Elva McZeal's project-
based contract, instead opting to give the tenants Section 8 vouch-
ers, which they could use to leave the building and rent apart-
ments elsewhere in the city. These two realities leave projects like
Elva McZeal all but ineligible for private loans.
Considering all that HUD is now expecting of the tenants,
Jones wonders if the agency also plans to pursue Howard
Kestenberg and the former partners of William & Georgia, putting
them on the hot seat for exactly how they spent HUD's Section 8
payments over the years. The HUD Inspector General 's office
says its auditors completed an investigation and the fIle was sent
to the Justice Department's civil division for action. The U.S.
Attorney's office confmns that the case is under investigation-
but so far, that's all they will say.
"HUD has been very, very apologetic," Jones concedes. But she
says they shouldn't forget that the agency still bears responsibility
for what has happened to Elva McZeal. HUD's inspectors visited
her building numerous times as the project fell into disrepair under
the Kestenbergs' control, she says-but nothing was ever done.
"Banks are being asked to make long-term commitments,"
says Elliot Hobbs, vice president of Chase Community
Development Corp. "But we can readily see that without project-
based Section 8- and the HUD contract that goes along with it- 'They had their eyes closed," she says .
BDD's
Marketilg
PlaD
The problem was obvious.
After 30 J8&I'8 ofbuUcUag &ad subsl
dlzIDg apartmeDts for the poor, the
aatlOD'S pabUc boaalDg ageDey faced &a
ImpeDdlag meltdowa ID 1996. ReDtai sub
sldy ccmtracta for 10,000 private proper-
ties would be comIDg up for reDewai SOOD,
theaSecretary Beary ClaDel'08 of the
Departmeat of BoaaIDg &ad Urb&a
DeveiopmeDt (BUD) told CoDIJ'88L Uthe
program was DOt reformed, be WarDed,
BUD would be forced to speDd Ita eDtire
budget OD this oue maDdate.
CIaDeroa' aoIDtioa was a simple oae.lD
a JuDe 1996 letter to the SeDate, be argued
that BUD aboaId aDd Its J)I'OIraID directly
suba .... ztng prIvateIyowaed bODaIDg
developmeats.lDatead, teD&Dta abould
receive voacbe:ra., wbIch they could use to
pay reDt 8.IIJ'Wbere. The poUc:y would bave
the eIrect of "promotIDg reaIdeDt cboIce
aDd 8IDbracIDg market dllldpllDe."
Teaaat actIvIsta cbarged that
ClaD8l'08' proposal, backed by the
RepabUcaa-domlDated Boase of
RepreaeDtatlves, would have doomed
IIl&DJ of the L6 mlWOD telULDts wbo car
reDtly live ID this boasIDg. Today, bowev
er, these same activists are clalmlDg a
"moDUlDeDtai victory," saylDgthat local
teaaat pressure-aimed atrateglcaUy at
-
Kew York SeDator &lpboD88 D'&mato &ad
carreDt BUD Secretary ADdrew Cuomo-
ultimately served to protect mucb of this
lowlDcome boaalDg stock.
There Is DO doubt, bowever, that the
IIuItlfamlly 4aaIsted IIoaaIDg Reform aDd
AfrordabWty Act, algDed IDto law last
October, wW dramatically cba.Dg8 the face
of BUD's private boaaIDg program. U au
goes as planned, It abould also solve oue of
the a.g&DCJ's moat ezpeaaIve problema.
CarreDtly, lD&Dy private laDdIorda
with eDtire ballcUaga recelvlDg SeetlOD 8
subsidies are c:barItDI reata far ID ucesa
of wbat they could get from UIUIubsldlzed
teD&Dta. To save mODey, BUD poUey
makers Deeded to brIDg those paymeata
dowa. But they kDew laDdIorda mIgbt
walk away from their ballcUaga If BUD
Imposed cats that were too draatlc. TbIs,
too, would have beeD coatly because the
buUcUaga have tupayer.guara.Dteed
mortgages.
The solutloa, kDowa as "mark to
market," wW give I&Ddlorda with the
moat u:peaaIve reDta the optIOD of reDe
gotIatIag their mortgage paymeDts. Part
of the mortgage wW be abelved so that
reata caa be lowered &ad, beDce, Seetloa
8 coats reduced. The pl&D Is u:pec:tecI to
keep I&Ddlorda ID the program aDd lower
BUD's reat subsidy coats by more th&D
$4.6 bUUOD over the Dut live years.
The law does have some dlstarblDg
ImpUcatiou for lowlDcome teD&Dta.
I"Irst of au, teD&Dta ID &a eatImatecl40 to
&0 perceat of the buUcUaga wW receive
voacbera,jaat as ClaD8l'08 recommeDded,
auowlag them to stay ID their carreDt
bomes or move elsewbere. ID the loag
I'UD, critics say, this could erode the over
au avaUabWty of lowlDcome boasIDg.
TbIs abould Dot affect ID Kew York City,
bowever, because of a clause that
uempta tIgbt boaaIDg markets.
Moreover, BUD will step out of the
baalDesa of moDitorIDg these buUcUaga.
CoDtracta wW IDatead be reDegotiated
aDd ovel'S88ll by local players, most likely
state boaaIDg flDaDce ageDcles. llaDy of
the agaacles have good repatatloaa, bat
they wW be more vulDerable to local poU.
tics &ad, advocates say, DObody caa pre
dlct bow eJrectIve each oue wW be at
keepIDg I&Ddlorda boDest.
0veraD, bowever, the law Is a lot bet
ter th&D the proposal ClaD8l'08 orlglDally
broagbt to Coagress, says Bmy Eaatoa, a
lobbyist for the Kew York State Teaaata
.Ii KelPbors CoaIItioD (IIYS'l'IfC). Tb&Dka
to provIsIou IDaerted aDd abepberded by
D'&mato, the law ma.IDta.ID8 proJectbaaed
"Daaclug ID Kew York City, be says. The
law also protects buUcUaga wbere moat
teD&Dta are elderly or disabled.
Advocates aDd BUD ofIlcIaIs are both
apecaIatIDgthat, ultimately, Kew York
City's 70,000 teD&Dta ID the J)I'OIraID
WOD't feelmacb of &a Impact. It's true
laDdIorda caa duck out wbea their Seetloa
8 ccmtracta ezpIre, DOtes JobD LaJraa, &a
aaalataDt maDager ID BUD's Kew York
oJIlce. Bat they wW ODIy do so If they
u:pect to get blgber reDta oa the opea
market. stDce most of tbeae ballcUaga are
located ID lower IDcome uel82lborbooda,
laDdIorda wW probably prefer to keep
receIvIDg the Seetloa 8 subsidies, be says.
BaatOD agrees. But be adds that teD
aDta mast watch bow BUD aDd, eveDtaaI
Iy, the "esI",ated local bODaIDg flDaDce
agaaey, use the law. ""l'ratb Is, It's easy to
say, this Is wbat we thIDk the Impact of
the Ieglalatloa wW be," be says. "But It's
Dever beeD tested. We Deed to be very
vIgIl&Dt. "-101
CITY LIMITS
Harlem Benighted
By Ellen Stroud
"Harlem: The Making of a
Ghetto, " by Gilbert Osofsky,
Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 1997
(orig. 1966), 276 pages,
paper $14.95.
G
ilbert Osofsky's "Harlem:
The Making of a Ghetto"
is back in print, which is
good news. Osofsky,
who spent most of his
career on the faculty at the
University of illinois, is widely rec-
ognized as a pioneer of African-
American urban history. Thirty
years after his book was first published, and
more than 20 years after its author's untimely death at the age
of 39, Osofsky's narrative is still the best history of Harlem we
have. Unfortunately, the book is bleak to a fault.
Despite its place as the country's premier African-American
neighborhood, Harlem has not been nearly so blessed with his-
torians as, for example, Chicago. Osofsky's contemporary,
Allan Spear, wrote a similarly harsh history of the ghettoization
of African Americans in "Black Chicago" (1967), describing
black life there as a battle with the overwhelming forces of
racism, poverty and overcrowding. But more recently, James
Grossman's "Land of Hope" (1989) and Nicholas Lemann's
"The Promised Land" (1991) have given us more nuanced and
complete stories of the formation of Chicago's black communi-
ty, emphasizing what residents did as opposed to what was done
to them. Grossman and Lemann each give attention to both
hardship and hope.
To Osofsky, Harlem is a place with no hope. It is the squalid
product of the racism and poverty that excluded Southern black
migrants from much of New York City. As a left-leaning schol-
ar of the 1960s, Osofsky emphasizes the misery of Harlem, not
out of a racist blindness for cultural and political strengths, but
out of a desire to illustrate the need for the era's sweeping
antipoverty initiatives.
Certainly there is great value in Osofsky's detailed chron-
icle of the neighborhood's origins. He details the collapse of
the Harlem real estate market in 1904 after an ill-fated build-
ing spree that outpaced the anticipated northward expansion
of the subways. As a result, fme residences intended for white
businessmen and their families were left standing empty at a
time when black New Yorkers were desperate for decent
housing. Osofsky tells us that African-American entrepreneur
Philip A. Payton, Jr. convinced cash-strapped landlords to
accept black tenants, who jumped at the chance to move in.
The homes were not just decent; many were luxurious. The
beautiful brownstones on 138th and 139th streets, for exam-
JANUARY 1998
pie, designed by the famous architect Stanford White,
are enduring evidence of the funda-
mental quality of Harlem's hous-
ing stock.
Osofsky, however, does not
emphasize the quality of Harlem's
housing; he emphasizes the neigh-
borhood's troubles. He focuses on
deteriorating living conditions, which
he blames on high rent, low wages,
rural migrants with little training in
urban sanitation, and racist landlords'
reluctance to maintain their properties.
Also, in one of his most troubling analyt-
ical turns, Osofsky blames some of
Harlem's plight on what he describes as
the African-American "attitude toward
family life."
He argues that slavery "initially
destroyed the entire concept of family life for
American Negroes" and was in part responsi-
ble for juvenile delinquency in Harlem and for
the neighborhood's eventual decline. His line
of reasoning found many adherents in the 1960s and '70s-and
some conservative theorists still follow it today. But the argu-
ment ignores the well-documented, deeply held commitment of
slaves to their spouses and children despite horrific obstacles
created by slaveholders.
The positive aspects of Harlem life get short shrift in
Osofsky's narrative, despite his particularly strong chapter on
the growing political clout of the concentrated black communi-
ty. But in addition to leverage in politics, the black community
in Harlem fostered a flourishing of black art and literature,
encouraged businesses and a black middle class to thrive, and
provided a network of support for migrants from the South.
In Osofsky's telling, even the Harlem Renaissance loses its
glamour. He confines it to an epilogue and characterizes it as a
false image masking the squalor that was truly Harlem.
Ironically, the fashionable, smiling women beneath the bleak
title on the cover of this new edition don't evoke a miserable
ghetto but the Harlem of hope that Osofsky neglected.
In his assessment of the overwhelming impact of outside
forces on Harlem, Osofsky certainly reflects the thinking of his
day. It is unfortunate, therefore, that this new edition offers no
historiographical context, a shortcoming which could easily have
been remedied with the inclusion of a new introductory essay.
Still, Osofsky teaches us something invaluable, albeit unin-
tentional: A history that focuses on disembodied forces and
processes affecting a community, rather than on the beliefs and
actions of the members of that community, can't tell a com-
plete story .
Ellen Stroud is a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. Urban and
Environmental History at Columbia University.
A version of this review first appeared on the electronic
discussion group h-urban.
REVIEW
-
CITYVIEW
nity districts they serve, and any new program developments
should be coordinated with community-based organizations and,
wherever possible, be performed by those organizations." The
report suggested that all foster care and child welfare services,
except adoptions, be offered within neighborhood borders, and
that the Human Resources Administration should "be decentral-
ized, refocused and reformed according to recent City Charter
To Overcome the Flood
revisions, creating 59
community districts in
New York City."
These suggestions
James R.
Dumpson, a
former commis-
sioner of New
York City's
Department of
Welfare and
administrator of
the Human
Resources
Administration, is
now a senior con-
sultant with the
New York
Community Trust.
-
By James R. Dumpson
I
t has been almost two years since Mayor Giuliani
appointed Nicholas Scoppetta to take control of New
York City's failing child welfare system. As a former fos-
ter child himself, Commissioner Scoppetta promised to
fashion a new agency that would more vigilently protect
children and speed the adoption of youngsters left to languish
for years in foster care. He has since accomplished some of
these goals.
Soon after taking office, however, Commissioner Scoppetta
also proposed to reform the child welfare system in a more fun-
damental way by decentralizing and reorienting services so they
are rooted more solidly in their communities. He proposed-with
much advocate support-that children removed from their par-
ents should be placed in foster homes in the same neighborhood;
that preventive, protective and foster care services
should be more closely integrated with community
institutions such as schools, nonprofit social services,
health centers and churches; and that the nonprofit
agencies which run much of the system should have
offices in the neighborhoods where their clients live.
These promised reforms have been much delayed.
But in late November, the Administration for
Children's Services released a preliminary plan for
putting them in place. Such changes are essential, if
only for the simple fact that 80 percent of the chil-
dren removed from their families eventually return
home. As the latest Child Welfare Watch report-
published by the Center for an Urban Future and
the New York Forum-makes clear, keeping par-
ents and their children near one another speeds the
process of moving young people out of foster care
and helps families become stable and strong.
This plan represents an improvement over the current sys-
tem. Yet it also echoes previously unheeded advice.
The history of the last several decades includes a long series
of aborted attempts to respond to the social and economic needs
of children and families in this city. It is a history of studies and
more studies made at the request of mayors concerned about
"the child welfare system." I recall the study by Lauren Hyde
written while I was Commissioner of the Deparment of
Welfare, a predecessor to the Human Resources
Administration. It too called for redesigning the system around
community-based services. That was in 1962.
Much later, I co-chaired the task force that produced another
report, "Redirecting Foster Care: A Report to the Mayor of the
City of New York" in June 1980. We urged that "agencies should
maintain field operations in the neighborhoods and the commu-
made 17 years ago have
been repeated, in substance, by all subsequent govemrnent-
sponsored child welfare studies-including Commissioner
Scoppetta's own 1996 master plan for reform.
All of this leads me to recall the statement of Dr. Johnetta
Cole, former president of Spellman College, when she quoted a
Southern Baptist minister who exhorted his flock: "It's time to
stop predicting the flood, and start building the ark we need."
Why are we today still repeating ourselves? I submit that
these recommendations have not become public policy because
there has not been the politcal will to adopt them as policy.
First, government has failed to direct the allocation of the
necessary fiscal resources to support these reforms both in gov-
ernment-operated programs and in government-supported
agencies that provide services to children and families.
And second, in order to create such a system, community
residents would have to be actively involved in the new power
structure-a threatening thought for some of those who run city
agencies and nonprofits. There would have to be genuine com-
munity involvement in all advisory groups, planning commit-
tees, and nonprofit boards of directors; in decision-making
about the relocation of services; and in assessing agency
accountability. That would be politically audacious.
Fortunately, this is a unique time for child welfare reform.
Commissioner Scoppetta's proposal for reinstituting community
focus into child welfare is now out for public comment. While
Commissioner Scoppetta has been criticized for not moving fast
enough to reform ACS, the fact remains that he has a close
friendship with the mayor and, as a result, this is the best chance
New York has seen to garner the funding and commitment to
make reform a reality.
We can continue to dialogue among ourselves and meet next
year, and the next year, and once again defme our commitment
to the concept of neighborhood-based comprehensive service
networks, or we can seize this moment and seek to permanent-
ly change the system.
Certainly we should critique the commissioner's plan and
urge that changes we believe can be supported are made. But
Commissioner Scoppetta's proposal may remain "just a plan"
unless we build on it, engage in meaningful public debate and
generate the political will required to achieve a more respon-
sive, more effective, more humane-and yes, a more inclusive,
community-involved child welfare system.
It's time to stop predicting the flood. Let's start building the
ark we need for the protection and healthy growth of vulnera-
ble children and families in New York City .
This essay is adapted from closing remarks offered at the Child
Welfare Watch forum held November 25th. For a copy of the
report issued that day, call Neil Kleiman at (212) 479-3353.
CITY LIMITS
Homes, Phones & Zones
Homele ne :
The Door is Closed
W
hile the statistics alone offer a stark appraisal of the
city's homeless shelter system, the most astonishing
information included in Anna Lou Dehavenon's 19th
annual report on family homelessness in New York is its insid-
er's view of the Bronx Emergency Assistance Unit, which is the
main portal into the system.
Families in need of shelter are no longer attended to by
trained caseworkers at the EAU. Instead, their first stop is the
triage office, staffed mainly by "retired New York City police
officers (who may carry guns)." The office's civil service work-
ers, the author writes, have been replaced by "per diem fraud
investigators ... who wore shiny gold metal badges," and women
and children seeking housing are presumed gUilty of lying
about the true degree of their desperation.
Of the 118 families interviewed by Dehavenon's Action
Research Project on Homelessness and Family Health over the
course of 17 nights, only 39 were first-time applicants for shel-
ter. The rest had been rejected by the city at least once-and
half had been rejected four or more times. Incredibly, only
seven of the 118 farnilies received even temporary placement in
shelters while the researchers were at the EAU.
For a copy of the report, contact Liz Krueger or Liz Accles
at the Community Food Resource Center, 212-344-0195.
Hou. lng Inve.tment:
Many Happy Returns
T
he $4 billion the city has spent since 1985 on con-
structing and renovating housing bought more than a
roof over the heads of more than 150,000 households.
It also created at least 99,000 jobs and $4.5 billion in person-
al income from construction activity and its multiplier effect,
according to a new report authored by Alex Schwartz of the
New School's Community Development Research Center
and two staffers at the Local Initiatives Support Corporation
(LISC).
According to "The Economic Impact of New York City's
Housing Investments: At the Crossroads," the city's housing
investment has so far netted $307 million in sales, excise and
other taxes. The report estimates that in 20 years these buildings
will pay for themselves in taxes-and after that, the city will see
a profit. Meanwhile, the housing's residents create another $162
million annually in taxes from their personal spending by sup-
porting approximately 25,000 jobs in the city and generating
$913 million in personal income.
The sponsors of the report include organizations that were
integral to the late-1980s, early-1990s surge in city housing
investment, such as LISC, The Enterprise Foundation, the New
York City Housing Partnership and the Corporation for
Supportive Housing.
Left unmentioned is the larger political point: Since the
Giuliani administration came into office, city capital spending
on housing has dropped more than 35 percent.
"The Economic Impact of New York City's Housing
JANUARY 1998
Investments: At the Crossroads," Free, LISC, fax request to
212-687-1396, attn. Michael Bornheimer.
Telemarketing:
Small Change
H
ere's another reason to be annoyed at those phone calls
by telemarketers in the middle of dinner-when they're
for charity, much of the money never actually gets to
the organization, reports New York State Attorney General
Dennis Vacco. According to "Pennies for Charity:
Telemarketing by Professional Fundraisers," less than 37 per-
cent of the donations raised over the phone by private market-
ing companies registered in New York State actually found its
way to charitable organizations in 1996.
The report, released in October, documents that of $163.6
million raised in 600 fundraising campaigns, more than $103
million was eaten up by fees and other costs. The majority of
the nonprofIts, which ranged from American Legion posts to
Reach Our Children, Inc., recouped less than 30 percent of the
take-and only a handful received more than 70 percent.
"Pennies for Charity," Free, Office of the Attorney General,
212-416-8000, www.oag.state.ny.us/charities.html/
Empowerment Zone.:
NYC Needed: Local Reps
N
ew York City's Empowerment Zone is much less
empowering to community groups than those across
the rest of the nation, according to the second of three
EZ studies from the Howard Samuels State Management and
Policy Center at CUNY.
The reports look at the role of communities in the nation's
six urban zones. New York is the only city without a single
community representative on the zone's governance board. In
Atlanta, the city with the next lowest community representa-
tion, 35 percent of the board-six members---comes from the
community.
The split within New York's Empowerment Zone, between
the Upper Manhattan and South Bronx subzones, is also
notable. While the board for the Upper Manhattan
Empowerment Zone Development Corporation has members
from community planning boards, the South Bronx Overall
Economic Development Corporation has no community board
members.
Ironically, the South Bronx has ended up with more com-
munity input in setting zone priorities, emphasizing job and
entrepreneurial training, English courses and welfare-to-work
programs. Across the river, the Upper Manhattan Zone-with
83 percent of the funding and population- has focused solely
on business development.
The report is a dewiled and at times quantitative look at the
political history of the nation's Empowerment Zones. But it's
missing an assessment of how successful they have been.
"Empowerment Zone Implementation: Community
Participation and Community Capacity," Free, Howard
Samuels State Management and Policy Center, 212-642-2974.
AMMO
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CITY LIMITS
Continued from page 29
TEACHER, Day Care. East New York non-profit seeks motivated, chilck)rient-
ed individual for teacher position in day care center at transitional residence
for homeless families. Teach class, plan activities for children, conduct par-
ent workshops, etc. B.S. in teaching and one year early childhood teaching
experience required. $20-23,000 plus benefits commensurate with experi-
ence. Fax or mail resumes w/ cover letter to: Director, Rose McCarthy
Family Residence, 882 Dumont Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11207. Fax: 718-385-
7932. No phone calls please. Recent graduates welcome to apply.
PROPERTY MANAGER. Growing East New York non-profit housing agency
seeks energetic individual to manage affordable housing projects. At least
2 years experience in tenant relations, rent collection and low-income hous-
ing tax credit compliance required. B.A./B.S. and bilingual Spanish/English
preferred. Salary: $23,000 to $30,000 depending on experience. Mail/fax
resume: Director of Housing, East New York Urban Youth Corps, 539
Alabama Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11207. Fax: 718-922-1171.
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF HOUSING & ECONOMIC DEVD.OPMENT. Growing East
New York non-profit housing agency with several funded new construction
and rehabilitation affordable housing developments in progress seeks
experienced individual to manage the development of these projects and to
implement new housing and economic development initiatives. B.A./B.S.
and at least 3 years experience in project design and development, financ-
ing, development team coordination and neighborhood planning. Salary:
low to mid $30s depending on experience. Mail/fax resume: Director of
Housing & Economic Development, East New York Urban Youth Corps, 539
Alabama Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11207. Fax: 718-922-1171.
SENIOR ASSOCIATE, Financial Services to analyze, close, and monitor loans
and provide technical assistance to nonprofits on their facilities issues.
Bachelor' s (master' s preferred) in business, public administration or relat-
ed field; 2-4 years in financial services (preferably lending); nonprofit/ com-
munity development experience. Good writing and presentation skills, Excel
and MS Word. Salary commensurate with experience. Letter/ resume to:
Norah McVeigh, Director, Financial Services, Nonprofit Facilities Fund, 70
West 36th St. , 11th Fl., NYC 10018.
PROGRAM ASSISTANT for Manager of program that provides loans and advi -
sory services to NY non profits for their facil ities. Assistant will be initial
cl ient contact, assist in program administration and publicity, maintain data-
base. Knowledge of MS Word, Excel, Access a plus, also familiarity/ inter-
est in nonprofits. College degree, related work experience preferred. Salary
mid-high twenties. Send/ fax cover/resume to: Chris Jenkins, Nonprofit
Facilities Fund, 70 West 36th St., NYC 10018. Fax: 212-268-8653.
SPECIAL ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT'S OFFICE. The Edna McConnell Clark
Foundation seeks a Special Assistant to perform a variety of tasks to sup-
port the work of the office and advance the mission of the Foundation.
Responsibilities include managing the Foundation' s venture fund that pro-
vides grants in special institution-wide priorities; evaluating internal admin-
istrative policies and procedures; planning and organizing meetings and
special events; drafting correspondence, speeches and concept papers;
conducting research; and working across the corporation with staff on a
variety of aSSignments. Excellent interpersonal and communication skills a
must. Advanced degree required and related practical experience preferred.
Compensation commensurate with experience. Mail or fax resume and
cover letter to: Kathy Schoonmaker, The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation,
250 Park Ave., NYC 10177-0026. Fax 212-986-4558.
WHEDCO, the Women' s Housing & Economic Development Corporation, is
seeking two energetic and self-motivated people to fill challenging positions
in both our Manhattan and Bronx offices: OFFICE MANAGER! FULL-CHARGE
BOOKKEEPER. Advanced facility with MS Word 6.0 for Windows. Intermediate
facility with Excel. Experienced in managing automated payroll system;
booking bill abies and receivables; coordinating office systems and equip-
ment, including maintenance agreements; basic financial recordkeeping.
Some experience with human resources and general office support. ADMIN-
ISTRA11VE ASSISTANT. Excellent written and oral communication skills.
Advanced facility with MS Word 6.0. Ability to work with and for multi-disci-
plinary team. All positions pay competitive salary and excellent benefits in
flexible, family-friendly work environment and dynamic organization. Fax
cover letter and resume to Nancy Biberman/ Barbara Petro Budacovich at
212-255-8722 or 718-839-1103.
Welfare Law Center seeks CIRCUIT RlDERICOMPUTER SPECIALIST (full-time) to
maintain computer communications system and train low-income groups in
J .... NU .... RY 1998
communications technology (travel required); and LIAISON (part-time) for
outreach to low-income groups. For pOSition announcements, contact
Welfare Law Center, tel : 212-633-6967, e-mail : hn0135@handsnet.org.
New York University Institute for Education and Social Policy, Community
Involvement Program (CIP): PROJECT COORDINATOR needed to coordinate the
provision of information and technical assistance to community-based organi-
zations working to improve the public schools in NYC and nationally. The PC
will manage two citywide school reform projects. Responsibil ities include: con-
ducting outreach, tracking project development, conducting research, and f a c i ~
itating meetings. Candidates should have experience working with community-
based organizations in diverse communities. Knowledge of NYC public schools
and public education issues. Bilingual ability (English and Spanish) a plus.
Salary commensurate with experience. Send resume and cover letter no later
than January 23rd to: Kavitha Mediratta, Institute for Education and Social
Policy, 285 Mercer St., NYC 10003. People of color encouraged to apply.
PROPERTY MANAGER. Growing neighborhood-based organization seeks expe-
rienced, motivated individual to oversee apartment rentals, collections, ten-
ant relations and maintenance staff. Must be computer literate. Experience
with rental subsidies and knowledge of building systems required. Salary
commensurate with experience. Send resume to Pratt Area Community
CounCil , 201 DeKalb Ave. , Brooklyn, NY 11205. Fax: 718-522-2604.
JOB COACH. Highbridge Community Life Center, a South Bronx CBO, seeks a
dynamic individual to provide on-the-job support to graduates of a sector-
specific job training program. Coach must possess strong interpersonal
skills to work with low-income minorities and private sector employer, abil i-
ty to manage case load of 50+ graduates. Required travel at night. $25K-
$30K. Fax resume to Melissa, 718-681-4137.
ORGANIZER wanted at NYC Coalition Against Hunger. Build grassroots base
for anti-hunger policy advocacy. We represent soup kitchens, food pantries,
and religious activists around NYC dedicated to fighting the attack on the
poor. Great people skills, writing, organizational skills needed. Bilingual
helpful. 4 days/ week, $28,000 plus health benefits, starts mid-January.
Resumes to Dave Cutler, 29 John St., #708, NYC 10038. Or fax to 212-
385-4330.
Established New York City not-for-profit organization servicing homeless
adults has the following opportunities available in its rapidly growing
Employment Services Department: DIRECTOR OF EMPLOYMENT SERVICES.
The right candidate is entrepreneurial , energetic and has an under-
standing of effective welfare-to-work strategies. Responsible for all
aspects of program development, including building and maintaining
relationships with government funders and major employers, and super-
vising ten vocational counselors and job developers. Also involved in
planning business ventures to employ clients. Master' s degree required.
SENIOR REHABILITATION COUNSELOR. Need strong cl inical manager to
coordinate employability skills workshops, create transitional work
opportunities, and develop new training and education resources for
mentally ill clients and clients in recovery. Will also supervise counsel-
ing staff and work with government funders. Qualifications: M.A. in
Rehabil itation Psychology or related field. Certified Rehabilitation
Counselor strongly preferred. Please fax or mail your resume and salary
requirements to: Katherine Bedford, Project Renewal Inc. , 200 Varick
St. , NYC 10014. Fax: 212-243-4868.
FIT lINANTllANDLORD COUNSaOR with non-profit housing organization.
Salary: mid-high twenties, full benefits. Qualifications: Bilingual- English/
Spanish; strong writing skills; familiarity with housing regulations; ability to
organize and prioritize workload and work with people. Send resume to:
NHN, 5313 5th Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11220.
Leviticus Fund, a Yonkers-based CDFI seeks a fUll-time LOAN OFFICER.
Duties include origination, underwriting and portfolio management. For info
call Patricia Walsh: 914-237-3306.
SENIOR STAFF ATTORNEY, Corporate/ Transactional. Lawyers Alliance for New
York, the leading provider of free and low-cost legal services to non-profit
organizations in New York City, has an immediate opening for a Senior Staff
Attorney. Work closely with diverse clients in low-income communities to
provide a wide variety of non-litigation business law services. Supervise out-
side law firms handl ing cases pro bono. Minimum 6 years experience work-
ing with corporate clients required, nonprofit experience preferred. Salary
$60K, DOE. Fax resume and cover letter to LANY Search Committee #3,
212-941-7458.
more jobs ads on page 39
.1:1
CITY LIMITS
sOAAUS

Continued from page 37
SENIOR STAFF AITORNEY, Economic Development. Lawyers Alliance for New
York, the leading provider of free and 10W{;ost legal services to non-profit orga-
nizations in New York City, has an immediate opening for a Senior Staff
Attorney. Work closely with diverse clients in the areas of economic develop.
ment, assisting them in designing new vehicles for job creation and business
development in low-income communities. Supervise outside law firms handling
cases pro bono. Minimum 6 years corporate transactional experience required,
with real estate and finance experience preferred. Salary $60K, DOE. Fax
resume and cover letter to LANY Search Committee #2, 212-941-7458.
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR FOR ADMINIS1RATlON. The American Red Cross in
Greater New York is seeking an experienced professional to join the lead-
ership team of the Relocation Support Program. The Assistant Director,
Administration, manages the administrative functions of a $600K program
providing off-site supportive services to homeless and formerly homeless
families. Responsibilities include database management, contract adminis-
tration, report writing, fiscal management, and some program oversight.
Requires B.A. , minimum 5 years administrative experience. You must have
experience in database management, contract administration, or both.
Applicants with related Master's and/ or supervisory experience preferred.
Salary low to mid $30s and benefits. EOE m/ f/ d/ v. Fax or mail resumes to:
American Red Cross, Employee Resources, Dept. F124, 150 Amsterdam
Ave., NYC 10023. Fax: 212-875-2357.
DIRECTOR OF ADMINIS1RATlON. Brooklyn Legal Services seeks a director of
administration to administer grants, manage financial and record-keeping
systems, support fundraising, and supervise non-casehandlers. Good orga-
nizational skills and commitment to public interest work essential. Salary
commensurate with experience. Fax resume to Chip Gray, 718-855-0733.
Catholic Charities has the following full-time positions available: JOB READI-
NESS COORDINATOR. Coordinate & implement Job Readiness Program for the
graduates of the Education Outreach Program & others. Plan & arrange job
readiness workshops. Assist in the goal setting and outside referrals for
participants. Assist in the fundraising for the program. B.A., B.S. or B.S.W.
Knowledge of Spanish. Prior experience working with people in need. Good
interpersonal, communication & networking skills. Ability to handle varied
responsibilities. Teaching ability helpful. Able to accept flexible hours. EDU-
CATIONAL PROGRAM COORDINATOR, Coordinate Education Outreach Program
by recruiting, training & supporting mentors. Develop activiti es and curricu-
lum with the Education Outreach Support Team. Maintain records for par-
ticipants. Assist the Job Readiness & Center Coordinator. B.A. or B.S.
Knowledge of Spanish. Prior experience working with people in need. Good
interpersonal, communication & networking skills. Teaching experience.
Ability to handle varied responsibilities & able to accept flexible work hours.
Excellent benefits, 19 holidays. Send resume, salary requirements and
include job title in your response to: 1011 Rrst Ave., Rm 1654, NYC 10022.
Or fax to 212-838-0637.
Help Build a National Tenant Movement! LEAD ORGANIZER: Mass Alliance
of HUD Tenants seeks experienced organizer for HUD tenant coalition in
Eastern MA and part-time support to local tenant buy-out deal. Supervise
and train staff, organize tenant groups and local campaigns. Prefer 3-5
years organizing, supervisory and training experience (preferably in hous-
ing) , and knowledge of HUD housing or ability to learn. FIT. Salary: high
$20s-low $30s plus benefits. Send resume to: MAHT, 353 Columbus
Ave., Boston, MA 02116. VISTA PROJECT COORDINATOR: National Alliance
of HUD Tenants (Boston) seeks organizer/ administrator for a national
tenant organizing VISTA project to provide technical assistance and field
support to 40 NAHJ VISTA sites. Prefer experience with VISTA, organiz-
ing/training experience, project administration and knowledge of HUD
housing or ability to learn. FIT. Salar y: High $20s-low $30s plus benefits.
Send resume to NAHT, 353 Columbus Ave., Boston, MA 02116.
SOCIAl WORKER. NMIC seeks an experienced social worker. Requirements:
M.S.W., bilingual English/ Spanish, 5-10 years experience in grassroots,
community-based settings with immigrant populations. Provide case man-
agement, supervise staff and M.S.W. students, perform administrative
tasks. Salary commensurate with experience. Send resumes to: NMIC, 76
Wadsworth Ave., NYC 10033. Fax: 212-928-4180.
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CHILD W ( L ~ A R ( WATCH: AN A6(NDA ~ O R CHAN6(
A BIANNUAL NEWSLETTER
ISSUE #2: RESTORING THE COMMUNITY CONNECTION
AN IN-DEPTH LOOK AT NEW YORK CITY'S CHI LD WELFARE SYSTEM.
WITH PROPOSALS TO ENSURE THE SAFETY AND WELL-BEl G OF CHILDREN
WHI LE STRENGTHENING FAMILIES AND COMMUNITI ES.
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